


MOONFACE MOONRAKERS IN BIG MOON CITY

by leepepper



Category: Actor RPF, Flight of the Conchords - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe RPF, New Zealand Actor RPF
Genre: Abuse, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Autism, Bipolar Disorder, Bisexuality, Cancer, Dysfunctional Family, Engagement, Established Relationship, F/M, Flashbacks, Gen, High School, Immigration & Emigration, Implied/Referenced Incest, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Jewish Character, M/M, Maori culture, Mental Health Issues, New Orleans, New Zealand, Parenthood, Recreational Drug Use, References to Polynesian Religion & Lore, Slice of Life, Theatre, Trans Character, University, this is NOT rpf.... not really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-21
Updated: 2020-11-05
Packaged: 2021-02-27 17:26:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 27
Words: 276,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22347151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leepepper/pseuds/leepepper
Summary: he’d moved to new orleans in the late spring of eight years ago pursuing a writing/editing job at a quirky little publication calledendymion, smelling likeway too tired for his ageandrunning away from messes partially of his own making. new zealand, for all its charm and its wonder, had become traumatic, occasionally even boring, overly well-trodden ground for mako over the course of thirty years on the north island, and while he’d known that he was essentially committing suicide in the disruption of his safety and routine and the wholesale uprooting of his life, he’d become so desperate for an other existence that he’d perceived no alternative choice but to leave.my alternative to full-blown rpf, in which i use (among others) taika waititi, jemaine clement, and chris hemsworth’s beautiful meatsuits and cherrypicked personality traits for my own characters. please read the notes before deciding to embark.
Relationships: Chris Hemsworth/Taika Waititi, Jemaine Clement/Taika Waititi, Taika Waititi/Chelsea Winstanley
Comments: 4
Kudos: 15





	1. 01

**Author's Note:**

> **_FAQ  
>  is _MOONRAKERS _real person fiction?_**  
>  kind of, but really no. kind of because mako in particular is heavily inspired by taika’s lived experiences and personality (the same goes for jeremiah and jemaine). more accurately, though, no – because each character is an original character with a fleshed out, separate life that i have personally developed and spent much time and energy working on; i do not by any stretch of the imagination think that mako and taika are the same person and i don’t want other people to think that either while engaging with _MOONRAKERS_ content. i have no problems exploiting your interest in taika, jemaine, and their relationship to get you to read this story, though.
> 
> it should also go without saying that rpf is a morally ambiguous activity, and that’s like, the number two reason _MOONRAKERS_ spiraled off into what it is now.
> 
>  ** _whose face belongs to who?_**  
>  if this was a movie, here's my cast of choice:
> 
>  _the kiwis_  
>  mako kahurangi gehringer - taika waititi  
> jeremiah temuera “jem” tui - jemaine clement  
> rui whetu ngata - if meryl streep were maori… can you believe  
> kora mae hinēkahu “kory” gehringer ihimaera - zendaya coleman, but younger, maori, and big-boned  
> aroha victoria ihimaera - chelsea winstanley, kind of? same facial structure and pale eyes, but darker skin and hair  
> ezra jakob gehringer - jeff goldblum  
> robin ezra “robbie” gehringer - alia shawkat if they were older and amab  
> shoshanna delilah “shanna” gehringer - katie mcgrath with hella freckles, and heavier  
> lee ann apfelbaum - lisa edelstein  
> taika ihimaera - cliff curtis  
> kirby “quick” quickley - bret mackenzie  
> tatum wharerahi - shannyn sossamon  
> rhys spooner - rhys darby  
> deacon zemmels - jonathan brugh  
> jami nowell - jackie van beek  
> stephani te ao maarama tihore - rachel house  
> loren atwood peltier - loren horsley
> 
>  _the crescent city crew_  
>  godfrey xinyi yen - godfrey gao, may he rest  
> kaylynn claire “kc” ramsey - sza  
> june phoenix zhang - lucy liu, but trans/intersex  
> gloria marie boone - solange knowles, but heavier  
> cynthia lulu solomon - teuila blakely  
> cassidy joel villiers - chris hemsworth
> 
>  _endymion new orleans_  
>  anna “annie” bailey - saoirse ronan  
> priyanka “priya” prasad - priyanka chopra with aubrey plaza’s energy  
> monica prince - regina king  
> david saverin - adrien brody  
> naomi shattenkirk - emmy rossum  
> flora fecteau - kristen stewart  
> jerri dupin - janelle monae, but heavier  
> fritz hunter-green - armie hammer  
> jonathan “jackie” zeringue - philip seymour hoffman, god rest his soul  
> hayden brinsko - lucky blue smith  
> paul hobdy - tom hanks  
> kelsey rubino - haley joel osment  
> jackson sinclair - mahershala ali  
> wanda ngo - awkwafina
> 
>  _the villiers_  
>  jonathan villiers - russell crowe  
> shelly villiers - robin wright  
> catherine “cat” villiers - amber heard, but heavier and with no makeup  
> charley villiers - jesse spenser  
> rosalee villiers, nee hollings - margot robbie
> 
>  _other characters_  
>  china wong - ming-na wen  
> alyssa janey - julia roberts (yes i would use miss thing in a minor role)  
> dean waipukakingi - james rolleston (in his 20s)

#  _ 1 _

Mako makes the drive to the airport on the edge of five o’clock. He’d set an alarm this morning before work, so he wouldn’t somehow lose track of time even with it emblazoned on every glowing-blinking-beeping-buzzing device ferrying him along through his day: his ye olde iPhone and his MacBook Pro with the various sea creatures stickered to the laptop cover and his work Mac ticking the minutes past in that quiet, unassuming manner that tip-taps just so on the neurotic bone at the nape of his neck, murmuring 10:43 AM and 12:08 PM and 3:27 PM at him while he shuffles continuously between a total of six different Word documents and worldofsolitaire.com, pretending – and sometimes actually managing – to be important and busy and a real life adult at his desk, in his office, with his Airport Time alarms. He doesn’t have time to go home and clean out his car before heading to New Orleans International, the work day ending at 5:00 and Jem’s plane getting in at 5:30, so when they stand on the asphalt before the terminal and load Jem’s suitcase and carry-on into the backseat of Mako’s ’98 Jetta after the customary  _ hongi _ , Mako has to just deal with the tight-lipped, squinty little face Jem makes at his FedEx box of file folders and Kory’s unicorn socks and hoodies strewn across the seat and floor, his not quite loving comment: “I appreciate you taking the time to clean the backseat. You know, like I’ve been bugging you to for weeks.”

“What’s that?” He cups a hand around his ear and makes like he’s straining to hear Jem’s voice, as if it is sequestered behind a screen or in a separate room. “Oh yeah,  _ you’re welcome _ for taking time out of  _ my birthday _ to pick your ass up from the airport. Wasn’t that so nice of me? Why yes, it was.”

Jem ignores him for now to yank one of Kory’s school bus hoodies out from beneath his carry-on and, of all the ridiculously anal things, fold it. It would be adorable if Mako wasn’t feeling the particular kind and degree of narcissism and indignation that he is at the moment. “You could’ve taken my car,” Jem mentions with nothing but kindness. “You know where I left the keys.”

“Yeah, but your car is so ugly and new, like – so rounded and smooth, no discernible shape, ugh. You know how I hate new cars, they all look like lozenges.” Mako stares up into the bleak concrete and steel architecture of the airport above them, the overhang from the terminal where maybe cars and also planes could be housed. “Also  _ wow _ , did I mention it was my birthday?!”

It is then that Jem folds his arms around him and pulls him into his chest, his big and warm hands finding temporary resting places in the inner right curve of Mako’s neck and the back left side of his ribcage, tugging and pressing and molding their bodies together, fuck the public setting. Mako just purrs like a cat and buries his face in Jem’s right shoulder, happy to be held. He picks up the scent of otherness on Jem’s clothing, of saltier air and the Southeastern Hemisphere. Not for the first time, he registers that New Zealand no longer smells like home to him, not after eight years having flown the coop.

“You smell great,” Jem murmurs, still holding him. Apparently his mind is also pointing toward the olfactory.

“I got a new shampoo while you were gone.” Mako, within the massive waste dump of his long-term memory bank, seeks and finds its particular scent. “ _ Beach sage _ . I love smelling like a woman.”

“Because you  _ are _ one, trapped in a man’s body?” Before Mako can protest the loving transphobic meanness of it all, Jem squeezes him tight for three blissful seconds, until he can’t really breathe nor can he think anything but supremely I-love-you and Where-have-you-been? sort of thoughts. Jem lowers his voice a touch: “Did you miss me?” His particular cadence – buttery and soft like crushed velvet – would be enough to turn Mako into some weepy movie person had they not practiced this particular scene countless times before, before Jem was a permanent resident of the States, back when he blew almost all his cash made producing films and teaching fancy art classes in Wellington flying out here for visits two or three times a year. 

Mako makes a throaty noise against Jem’s shoulder and tilts his head up to put his mouth against the other’s temple, hidden save for this moment behind the shank of his Ray-Bans. “Like a fungus,” he replies, then blows cool air into Jem’s ear until he laughs his snorty, pig-inspired, disturbing-the-migration-pattern-of-whales, deeper-than-Mozart-but-not-much-better laugh, until he’s good and tender and full of enough nerve to tuck their faces together and damply kiss him twice at the corner of his lips. They could have just waited until they got in the car, of course, but then there’d have been so much less bravery involved.

Behind the wheel, Mako notices Jem’s sunglasses – a pair not before seen by him, and they live literally sitting on top of each other – turning into plain eyeglasses, the lenses slipping from a translucent midnighty color to clear transparency in a matter of mere seconds. He keys on the ignition, listens to the car growl oh so satisfyingly to life, and blinks.

“Are those… transition lenses? Did you go to New Zealand for two weeks to get  _ transition lenses? _ ” 

Jem buckles his seatbelt, then reaches across the center console to, quite sweetly, hold Mako’s hand. “Healthcare is so much better there, my friend.”

Mako slaps the intruding hand away as he pulls smoothly out of his parking spot near the curb – curving the Jetta sideways with a slick and subtle turn of the steering wheel – and begins, as he often does, to bitch in the general direction of the dashboard. “I cannot believe I’m being made to look upon  _ transition lenses _ ” – he enunciates each syllable with patent disgust, lowering his voice like he does when he’s cunt-word swearing and Kory is in earshot – “with my own two eyes. A forty year-old man, wearing transition lenses. That level of basicness isn’t supposed to occur for the next ten years, at the very least.”

“Excuse me?” Jem puts on his offended-and-in-love _ - _ with-you voice. “I’m thirty-seven.”

“That’s what I’m saying. You’re too young for that kind of wackness.”

“’ _ Wackness _ ’? You’re the writer, bro, I think you can do better than that.”

“Fustiness. Old-fashioned tomfoolery. Unfashionable monkeyshines.” Mako shoots Jem a grin as they finally peel out onto Interstate 10, jiggles his eyebrows up and down. “I can go on.”

Finally, Jem manages to snag his hand. Instead of simply holding onto it, though, Jem brings the fingers up to his mouth and, inexplicably, bites their knuckles. “I know you can,” he whispers, as if to himself. Mako is not so gay as to just melt right then and there, but he’s certainly in that neighborhood.

Kory and Mum are barefoot in the kitchen when they get home, icing a moist, lemony block of cake with runny white frosting and playing The Isley Brothers on the stereo. As soon as there’s even so much as a crack in the door, here comes Kory skipping over the water damage depression in the hardwood to cry out, “Jem!” and fling her thick fourteen year oldness into said man’s arms, suitcase be damned. 

Mum is a little bit slower padding out into the front of the house in her muumuu and with her cat-eye glasses creeping down her nose when she fixes Jem with warm eyes and asks, “How was it?”

“The islands are still intact,” Jem tells her around the teenager currently wrapped around his neck and torso and making happy little cooing noises. “There’s a new movie theatre in Wellington.”

“Like there weren’t five million already,” Mako mutters just loudly enough for everyone to hear, milling into the house behind Jem and dumping his carry-on onto the couch where the eyeless cat is curled up and dozing. Stevie jumps a bit and seems somehow even in her blindness to anticipate Mako’s fingers when they come to hover just before her nose, to lightly disturb her whiskers.

“Was the trip worth it?” Mum is asking.

“Eh, you know how I feel about students,” Jem replies. “That is to say I  _ adore _ them.”

“Did you bring us anything?” Kory pipes from beneath Jem’s right armpit, arms twisted and clingy like thickset vines around his tree trunk middle.

“What kind of a person do you think I am?” Jem grinds his knuckles against Kory’s scalp until she yelps in delight. “Of course I did, you little scrod.”

Which is how Kory ends up with a fifth charm bracelet with which to adorn her wrists and Mum winds up spending most of the evening zipping through the first, second, third, and fourth chapters of a scholarly hardback with some neoclassical painting on the cover, murmuring to herself every so often, “Where are the references, though?” When Mako asks, lip jutting, where his present is, Jem politely informs him that present time for the birthday boy may only take place after dinner as per the official household code established five years ago in the fall of 2019. So it goes in our clown cottage full of actual and perceived children.

Ordinarily, for Mako, the what’s-for-dinner ritual looks something like this:

1.) Begin transformation into creature resembling a zombie.

1a.) Sit on the couch for at least one whole hour, optionally making groaning sounds every now and then.

1b.) Doze. Also optional.

2.) Halt transformation at the realization that it’s nearing 6:30 PM and something has to be done about dinner, preferably before the fourteen-, thirty-seven-, and seventy-six-year-olds start getting snippy.

3.) Stand in front of the fridge and look for changes in the magnets. (Today, someone – probably Mum – has left  _ itself a giant sucking sound like him the presidency _ , which, yeah, she might have been in a weird headspace this morning.)

3a.) Make a mood-dependent contribution ( _ saucy stubborn things you can do for my lover _ ).

4.) Open the fridge and let the cool air pool around him for some ecologically inconsiderate increment of time, like twenty or thirty seconds.

5.) Scan contents and summarily veto all of them.

6.) Open the freezer and let the cool air pool around him for some ecologically inconsiderate increment of time.

7.) Valiantly struggle with something buried in the most inconvenient section of the freezer.

8.) Sigh heavily while picking the dislodged box of oven pizza and bag of frozen strawberries up off the floor and sitting them momentarily on the countertop, where he will forget them after he closes the freezer and remember ten minutes later when he happens to traipse back into the kitchen and see them sitting there, thankfully still frozen.

9.) Conduct an internal debate rife with implications about ethical eating and food culture while holding, like a juggler poised for the beginning of his act, a bag of chicken breasts in one hand and a pack of ground beef in the other.

10.) Begin dialogue with anything present (usually Mum or the cat) on how he just doesn’t know what he wants! How does this happen every night!

11.) Take a household poll, in which Jem will invariably say something considerate and infuriating like, “Whatever you guys want is fine with me.”

11a.) Inevitably break tie between Mum and Kory with his own secret, somewhat guilty longing for beef.

12.) Smoke vape pen for five minutes to calm his nerves (alternately, take a hydroxyzine).

13.) Replace oven pizza and frozen strawberries in the freezer.

14.) Begin cooking.

Today, however, on the night of Jem’s much-heralded return and his thirty-eighth lifeversary, the ritual actually transpires more along the following lines:

1.) Go upstairs and collapse on his bed while watching Jem unpack and decidedly not helping.

2.) Be regaled with stories of old friends from down under down under, about Tatum’s new haircut (the close shave along the left side of her head that makes her look Portlandian) and her and Stephani’s new Cape Cod style house in Kowhai Park; about Jami’s second stint directing a feature being filmed down in Christchurch and Quick’s status as the leading man in said feature; about Loren’s four year-old and her newfound propensity for kissing complete strangers.

3.) Convince Jem to get in bed with him and lie on top of the covers and beneath the curve of his right arm.

3a.) Bask quietly in each other’s company.

4.) Consider the various offers for birthday dinner and drinks he received via text throughout the day.

4a.) Decline all of them; offer invites for dinner to those he knows can’t make it.

5.) Verbally review the text exchanges he and Jem had all day while Jem visibly fights the urge to nod off.

6.) Go downstairs to wash the last few dishes rotting in the bottom of the sink; successfully ask Jem to rinse and dry.

6a.) Exchange compliments all the while.

7.) Bounce ideas for dinner off Jem, because his presence is a simultaneously calming and decluttering force in his life.

8.) Decide on chicken fajitas.

9.) Smoke vape pen for five minutes to calm his nerves.

10.) Switch The Isley Brothers out for Elton John.

11.) Start cooking.

“Can I tell you something?” Mako asks, casual, while Elton sings the crocodile rock and he and Jem stand side-by-side at the counter, him chopping onions on a translucent plastic cutting board while Jem tries his clumsy hand at a green bell pepper amidst the slow, savory sizzling of chicken chunks on the stovetop.

Jem  _ mmhmm _ s in reply. “I love it when you tell me something.”

“I’m thinking about buying a share of Endymion.”

“Is the magazine doing that well?”

“I mean, it’s doing.” He aligns the Korean chopping knife with the rightmost longitude line of the sacrificial half-onion, begins to incise and press down three times without even thinking, tapping into simple culinary muscle memory. “It’s just that there’s this weird share that nobody really owns? I mean, technically Priya owns it, but she doesn’t  _ have _ to own it, and it would be nice, you know, to actually invest in my own work like the functioning adult I’m halfway successfully pretending to be.”

“ _ Halfway _ ,” Jem echoes, ambiguously mocking. Mako tries to rub his half-onion in his face and gets an elbow in the stomach for his trouble.

“Don’t cut yourself,” he says, laughing in the undertone. The directive comes out sounding like some shitty attempt at reverse psychology, so Mako puts everything down to reach over and gently adjust Jem’s hands and fingers around his knife and bell pepper. “You’ve got your fingers too far apart, you egg.”

“I know how to cut things!” Jem asserts. Kory produces an abrupt, raucous laugh from the living room, her I’ve-just-seen-something-hilarious-on-TikTok laugh. “I’ve cut things before.”

“Most of those things being yourself, yes.” Stevie comes padding into the kitchen, bushy-tailed and looking slightly wild . Mako carefully bumps Jem’s left hip with his own right. “You haven’t told me what you think about Endymion.”

“I’m not done processing, oh my God. I just got through with a twenty-hour plane ride and I’m only vertical right now through the magical powers of your birthday-ness, the sanctity of it all or something.” 

Jem gets a look on his face, then, one that Mako has come to recognize over the years as the faintly frustrated, brow-furrowing, pouty-lipped expression of not contempt, but simple dissatisfaction with this extraordinarily high maintenance, socially moronic person he’s chosen to love, because, it must be said, Mako is a self-admitted complete and raging psycho. The look only lasts for a moment. It is gone almost as quickly as it came. It jolts Mako’s whole world out of place, has him suddenly, breathtakingly tired.

Then Stevie jumps up onto the stove, there is the sound of feline and masculine human screeching, chicken chunks are flung still-sizzling onto the red-brown hardwood, and Jem, of course, slits his knife into the squishy pad of his thumb in the confusion. Stevie flies up the stairs and will probably refuse to come down for the next week at. While Mako bandages Jem’s finger in Mum’s bathroom, he is rewarded repeatedly with kisses feathered upon his scalp. Kory and Mum help clean up the fajita mess and tonight’s dinner is ordered from the jerk joint around the corner. Mako receives a brand new watch and a Starbucks gift card for his thirty-eighth. 

At 9:30, the family is found in the living room in various stages of unwinding: Mako and Jem with legs intertwined and feet propped up against the coffee table (unthinkable for Māori), leaning against each other on the sofa as two fish plopped together on the unsandy mid-autumn shore of sky blue suede domesticity; Kory curled up on the rug in front of the television, her hair a wavy, oceanic halo beneath her head as she scrolls through the middle-evening minutiae of her Facebook feed on her smartphone and yawns cat-like with every five or so minutes that pass; Mum tuned into  _ Family Feud _ from the comfort and convenience of her designated polyester blend recliner, pretty hazel eyes gradually disappearing more and more beneath heavy, crinkly lids as the minutes slip so slippery past; Stevie asserting her presence in absentia, her rainbow-feathers cat toy looming deliberately at the bottom of the stairs.

Jem speaks with his head tucked beneath Mako’s chin, a heavy, distinctly cranial weight against his collarbone: “Another year older.” It gives Mako a bit of a shock; he’d thought for sure Jem had fallen asleep.

“And none the wiser,” comes his murmured reply. 

“Ergo dumber.” Jem emits a low snort. “Freakin’ troglodyte.”

“You love my dumb ass, don’t you?” Mako asks, turning his head to push his bearded chin into Jem’s forehead, all the little hairs rubbing against the pale spread of skin that has just begun to permanently wrinkle with age. “That’s all you’ve ever wanted, is someone just as dumb and as fucked up as you.”

“Mmm,” Jem says. Mako interprets this as agreement.

And this is the kind of life Mako once imagined for himself while in the hurricane blender of his early twenties, fresh off of a double diagnosis of bipolar II and autism spectrum disorder, falling out of love, jobless and crazy and metaphorically flaying his own flesh from his body in the fight to be an actual, responsible, living human being. This: a life that disappears into slowly dropping off to sleep on the couch, in front of the television, with his kid and his partner and yeah, even his mother; a life so distinctly American and so entrenched in the structures and rhythms of late Western capitalism that it’s hard to believe that each member partaking in it was born on an island nearly eight-thousand miles away and descends from a tribe of flesh-eating barbarians; a life wasted away in the gentle gauze of fatigue and barely-there despair tempered only by the company he happens to keep; a life with Jem’s head on his clavicle (the enchantment of such closeness) with Mum nodding off and Kory giggling not five feet away always.

The world clicks back into place. Mako is still breathtakingly tired, but in the best way.


	2. 02

#  _ 2 _

He’d moved to New Orleans in the late Spring of eight years ago pursuing a writing/editing job at a quirky little publication called  _ Endymion _ , smelling way too tired for his age and running away from messes partially of his own making. New Zealand, for all its charm and its wonder, had become traumatic, occasionally even boring, overly well-trodden ground for Mako over the course of thirty years on the North Island, and while he’d known that he was essentially committing suicide in the disruption of his safety and routine and the wholesale uprooting of his life, he’d become so desperate for an other existence that he’d perceived no alternative choice but to leave. 

The night before takeoff, he’d dined with Jem at the little Wellington wine bistro five minutes from the house they used to inhabit on Hargreaves Street, the one with the floor-to-ceiling windows Mako used to perform accidental peepshows in for the neighbors. At the time, they weren’t dating, just mutually in love and mutually determined not to let anything come of it. Their rendezvous was intentionally public, for they had long learned the advantages of being surrounded by random, arbitrary nonsense to temporarily attach fractions of their attention to in the event that one of them said something the other wasn’t quite sure how to handle immediately, so that if for whatever reason either of them went quiet, at least the silence wouldn’t be as absolute and as violating as it would be were they in a private setting. They only pulled this card on occasions such as this, The Day Mako Went Away For Likely The Rest of Time, Forever.

They’d ordered drinks first – Moscato d’Asti, light and fairly soft on the spectrum between soft and hard drinks, for Jem; some ridiculously intense Zinfandel for Mako, poured until a mere inch of air existed between its bloody horizon and the rim of the glass – then spent awhile trading comments of varying consequence about the nice May weather and the milquetoast government and the frankly awful dinner party they’d gone to the previous week (during which Mako drank slightly too much and nearly got in a fist fight with some Pākehā self-proclaimed expert on World Heritage Sites and “cultural preservation”) before finally, the air settled around them in such a way that it was okay to get down to business, neural handshake having totally set in by that point.

“You’re going to be okay,” is what Jem had said, suddenly so tender and so serious and just, no, way too much over the two glasses of wine that sat on the table between them. He’d paused for Mako’s reaction (which was indiscernible initially), then said it again: “You’re going to be okay, mate.” He’d said this two or three times more. He’d kept repeating it, Mako thought, to comfort the both of them, perhaps even so the words coming out of his mouth wouldn’t manifest as something like “Don’t leave” or “I don’t want you to go” or “But this is your home” or “Please, please don’t leave.”

He hadn’t hesitated telling him he’d miss him, though.

Mako had rubbed the tip of his finger along the rim of his glass and hummed in the back of his throat because it was soothing to do as much as it was to hear. “I’ll miss you, too,” he’d said, and his best friend of approximately fourteen years had just smiled softly at him in the pale light of the evening like something right out of a movie – as if their stupid lives could ever be so rosy and picturesque, though sometimes Mako really believed they could when they looked at each other the ways in which they sometimes did or when it was Thursday night and his entire life was about to change. 

“Are you happy?” Jem had asked, nursing his glass of white. He always knew how to ask questions that were all knives wrapped in innocuous and concerned. Normally, Mako would have been confused and conflicted and never mad, but vaguely irritated with a question like that, but just then, when he’d been answering those kinds of questions for as long as he could remember and was right on the verge of not hearing those same questions firsthand anymore for an indeterminate amount of time, perhaps, he felt nothing but gratitude. 

And he had said, “I don’t know.”

And he had said, “I’m happy for the opportunity, of course. The city is a hot mess, but in a good way, you know. It’s a cool magazine, it’s a cool job. They’re ‘honored to have me,’ which is always great for the ego, and it’s what I’ve wanted to happen for me since… since I decided what I wanted to do.”

And he had said, “That doesn’t answer your question.”

Jem had done that softly smiling thing again, but this time it was more knowing than sorrowful, more Leave-it-to-you-to-say-a-million-words-and-never-quite-get-to-the-point than I’m-so-sad-you’re-putting-an-ocean-and-a-continent-between-us. “How about a different one, then?”

“Shoot.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Live inside you.”

Then was the time to take advantage of the waitresses dancing between tables and the watery classical music streaming from some indiscernible speaker in the bistro and the Boflex men walking prissy dogs that passed outside the window. Then was the time to go fish-eyed and silent and momentarily thoughtful in the face of such honesty – but they both had known then that the likelihood of their relationship dying before either one of them was going to spike the moment Mako stepped on his Qantus tomorrow, so better then than ever to talk about feelings.

“I don’t think that’s healthy or physically possible,” Jem had remarked, a knee-jerk deflection, but Mako had since developed a kind of callus over the part of him that was sensitive to their hypermasculine emotionally constipated bullshit, so the spaces in his chest hadn’t begun to sing and sting in reply.

Instead, he’d put his head down on the table for all the public to see and murmured, kind of like the child he’d never actually stopped being, “Still want to.”

Jem had made a sighing noise. “Me too, mate.”

“D’you wanna go home and kiss about it for three hours, while we can still make that decision?”

Silence for a while, then came the shushed reply: “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

So they hadn’t. Jem had surrendered to holding his hand in public and holding his body in public and letting their temples commune while they swayed visibly with the force of gravity and their own impending separation in public, but they’d saved the kissing for years later, after Mako was already long gone.

In the weeks and months before leaving for the Crescent City, Mako and his mother had done the emotionally and physically excruciating work of selling Nana Victoria’s farm up in Raukokore, approximately four hundred kilometers north. They’d waited all through February and March for some happy and rich software architect in Tauranga to decide that he and his family wanted a nice! big! house! right on the Bay of Plenty!, then packed up Mako’s car and made the drive up to spend a week cleaning up the artifacts of both of their childhoods from the home’s bathrooms and bedrooms and living room and sun room and attic, in yellow rubber gloves and old blue jeans.

Up into the attic, Mako had dragged the Rubbermaid rubbish bin from downstairs and began to fill it with all of the things Nana Victoria had left in the world after her death and he and his mother had simply forgotten or refused to get rid of for the sake of their composure until then: the earth-colored clay flowerpots painted with primitive representations of daisies and violets, the assortment of Bay of Plenty sea shells that would have ordinarily given Mako pause had his objective not been to clear the house entirely for the aliens that were coming to roost, the silver dollar plants that lo-and-behold had lost almost all of their dollars, the long since emptied wine jugs from places like Romania and Australia and California. He’d thrown away the old and rotting florist’s clay and florist’s tape and all of Nana’s watering cans eaten away by oxidation and covered in rust, the Japanese porcelain dish set that would probably garner a pretty penny on eBay if Mako had cared enough to do anything but let it hit the bottom of the trash can with a sharp  _ clink-clack _ ing sound of breakage, the likewise Japanese but almost certainly flea market fake scrolls decked out with kanji Nana used to tell him meant vague idyllic things like  _ strength _ and  _ peace _ , the ancient bottle of margarita mix whose insides had turned in the years since its sale from an appetizing apple green to gray-brown half-solid sludge. He’d paused at the mix CD labeled in Nana’s distinctive lilting scrawl “SOFT ROCK,” let it hover over the rubbish bin before tucking his T-shirt in and slipping it into the place between his abdomen and cotton blend Elton John, so he wouldn’t lose it or accidentally toss it. He’d thrown away the moth-bitten drapes, the moth-bitten bedsheets, Great-Uncle Harry’s moth-bitten World War II uniform.

In the master bathroom, he’d waded through a sea of ointment tubes petrified by time, of untouched loofahs and too-touched loofahs, of relics like bottled Mercurochrome and even some Zimelidine that had Mako questioning every interaction he’d ever had with his grandmother in life, of bottles of waxified lotion that had been used up until near-emptiness and then forgotten about in favor of new things of shea butter and St. Ives. He’d stacked the old and dusty towels in one black garbage bag and balled the disgusting shower curtain with soap scum accumulated on the bottom into a separate bag meant for actual trash. He’d done away with Nana’s candles and the old tubes of nail polish and toothpaste and shaving cream they’d all used in their own ways in the decades prior – Mum’s once-favorite shade of Sally Hansen (“Soak at Sunset”), his teenage can of Barbasol, Nana’s toothpaste for sensitive teeth with added baking powder. He’d washed his hands, stared for five minutes into the metallic gray tile, and gone to see what Mum was up to.

That night, rather than retreating to their own designated rooms from past tradition, mother and son had gone to sleep in Nana Victoria’s California King, chilly from the lack of occupying bodies in the past several years. They’d spoken to each other about what to do with the television from across a respectful yet intimate six inches of mattress.

“It’s practically a dinosaur now,” Mum had said, voice hushed as if not to disturb the dead family members that definitely crowded into the room’s corners and curled their transparent bodies into the cracks in the ceiling above and the floor beneath. She brought a hand up between them to tuck a piece of silvery hair behind her one ear exposed to the air. “Can’t believe how much I paid for it at the time. Heaps, bro. You have no idea how much five-hundred dollars used to be.”

“We could always keep it,” Mako had said, then they’d grinned at each other. They’d laughed wheezy, silly little laughs into the air between them.

“Maybe we could give it to the school?” Mum had ventured.

“Like they need it. They probably have better TVs by now.”

“You’re right. We should just toss it. Everything else is going in the rubbish.”

Mako had slept facing his mother that night. The next day, they’d walked the 1980s television all the way from the farm to the side of the winding road nearest to it, where at the very least, small animals might create nests inside of it. 

The day they’d headed back to Wellington, Mako had walked around the house – then cavernous after it had been emptied of all of their personal effects and furniture – with dust in his eyes and a stone in his gut. Oily, squarish spots where pictures had once hung had stared at him from the walls, daring him to remember the snapshot of Mum when she had gone off to college and rode her bike everywhere in denim bell-bottoms and cashmere turtlenecks; or the one of an angular and smiling Nana Victoria in her twenties alongside Great-Aunt Molly and Great-Uncle Harry, in the days when they were newborn adults and had just opened the general store in Raukokore; or the one of him with Cher the black sheep, his eight year-old hands sunk into her sable wool while the goats Joan Jett and Smokey Robinson dawdled in the background; or him with his first car, or him chopping potatoes, or him dozing on the couch.

The house sold for two-hundred and fifty grand. Mako still thinks about that number, whether or not he'd sold family history for too little. The ancestors, no doubt, would be horrified.

They’d made the final, ultimate movement in May. Flown three hours and forty-five minutes from Wellington International in Wellington to Kingsford International in Sydney, where they’d then spent the night at the Mantra before boarding a second plane the next morning to LAX. Fourteen hours of sitting. Fourteen hours of Kory, then only six, watching Disney movies on Mako’s MacBook and weeping out of sheer exhaustion, burrowing her little face into Mako’s chest while he carded fingers through her seasick hair and chewed Doublemint until it tasted like nothing but the inside of his mouth and did not smoke any cigarettes, dammit. Fourteen hours of Mum snoring like a freight train to the chagrin of all other passengers, and Kory napping with her body sprawled halfway across Mako’s lap, and Mako sleeping not at all, just staring at the window and the ceiling and the balding crown of the man seated directly in front of him, the crusty bits of eczema that peeked between the thinning hairs.

The stop in Los Angeles had been three hours and fifty-five minutes long. Mako had lain on the thin, patterned carpet of the waiting area with Kory curled on top of him like a cat for most of that time, his eyes closed and his arm loosely draped atop his daughter’s slumbering body and him no, still not sleeping, while Mum trawled through the airport for sustenance that at least looked like it was healthy. Then it was off to New Orleans, off to their vacant new house in the Bywater with its small labyrinth of international mail boxes, off to spending the first night on mattresses laid out on the living room floor, Kory still clinging to Mako’s chest like she depended on him for even the simple act of breathing (and in some ways, she did, and in some ways, she still does). Mako had slept then. Badly, of course, but he slept. 

The next morning, he was astounded by the soaking, penetrating heat of New Orleans, the way it made his innards the consistency of fluxed butter, everything outside of the ten foot radius around him distorted by liquid heat waves, plants and asphalt and cars swimming in pure hot. When they all took off from Wellington, it was a rather chilly 50 Fahrenheit and the city’s signature wind whipped affectionately around their bodies, howling, “Goodbye! I love you!” to them in transparent tones. Walking down the cracked Crescent City sidewalk on their first day of North American life, however – mostly silent, captivated by the teeming vegetation bursting through pavements and graffitied wooden and iron fence posts, gazing with blunted surprise at the frankly insane potholes carved like alien moon craters into the asphalt road, nodding vaguely and only half-agreeably when Mum so bitchily remarked, “Infrastructure, eh.” – Mako believed in some faraway corner of his mind that by the end of the week he’d be dead and all his organs would have melted like hot wax in this 90-degree nonsense, that he would wake up full of nothing but blood and bone soup and find his daughter and his mother in much the same state and it would have all been, as usual, his fault alone. And this, of course, was just the beginning.

There’s something almost traumatic about moving from the Bumfuck, Egypt bottom right edge of the world into the swirling-loud synaptic-intense upper left center of it. Of going to live in a synapse. Of selling your possessions – in extremely consumerist/modernist as well as Māori essence, your very lived self along with them – to start almost entirely fresh, clutching your little plastic pill organizer and your family members all the while. You never quite recover from it.

“I keep dreaming about Raukokore,” is what Mako is saying on Thursday. “I mean – the place I grew up, sorry.” He’s playing with the small ceramic elephant on the side table, passing it idly between his fingers. Why do therapists always have inane knickknacks in their offices in movies and, astoundingly enough, real life as well? Story at eleven.

China pulls her face out of the wad of Kleenex she’s been blowing all of her internal organs into out of her nose for the past thirty seconds. “Okay,” she says, nasal and still very much honey-voiced. “Let’s talk about that. Is it bothering you in any way?”

Instead of answering, Mako gives the woman a deep and sympathetic grimace. “Are you sure you’re okay? I mean, I can wait ‘till my appointment next week if you want to take an hour to you know, decompress your skull, take a nap–”

“Oh, please.” China, a regular LeBron James, tosses her snotty tissue into the wastebasket near her desk, a whole yard and a half away from where she sits cross-legged in a pale teal living chair. “This is nothing. Tell me what’s going on.”

Mako takes a moment to orient his thoughts, to worry the inside of his bottom lip with his teeth and search the office for something to just look at – the framed photograph on China’s desk of a girl approximately seven years old in red overalls with lettuce hem. She looks just like China with the same thin, almond-shaped eyes; the same full and flushed apples of her cheeks; the same straight bangs cut off just below the eyebrows. She’s never mentioned having a daughter, but Mako guesses she really wouldn’t.

“I have this… thing.” Mako places the elephant legs-down down on his thigh. “It’s like… every time something happens that makes me step back and like, meta-think, and realize that my brain doesn’t work the same way it used to, I remember being a kid and being  _ normal _ . Well, of course I was never  _ normal _ – Aspie and all that jazz – but I used to be mostly emotionally stable and just, emotionally  _ okay _ , like other people, and now I’m not and I’m like, painfully aware of that every time I dip into a depressive phase or I realize my thoughts are racing or I’m talking way too fast. And then I dream of Raukokore, because that was where I was more  _ normal _ . And I try to pinpoint the time when I stopped being normal, and it always occurs to me that it was probably when I moved back to Wellington after my Nan died. And just… I don’t know, it’s weird.”

“Do you think it’s useful to try and divide your life this way?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean–” China pauses to sniffle. “I mean, what are you getting out of dividing your life into these two… I’m going to call them oppositional phases. Normal and not-normal. Bipolar and not-bipolar. What are you getting out of that distinction?”

Mako traces his eyes over the ceiling tiles and each infinitesimal gray pinprick within them. “I guess nothing. I just… it feels good in those moments when I know for sure that I’m crazy to look back to a time when I wasn’t and know that I have that potential, at least, to be normal.” A laugh bursts out of him. “Or maybe I don’t anymore. Maybe there are all these things I can’t go back to. I can’t go back to New Zealand, I can’t go back to being like, sane, I can’t… I can’t go back to the life I had before, and I don’t know how to deal with it.”

“Does it make you unhappy that you can’t go back?”

And of course she would ask that, that question that makes his whole head spin, that begins to place everything in tiny little boxes with legible labels and clearly-marked capacities for neuroticism and general mental bullshit.

Mako says, “No.” Stops, squints at the spot on the wall just above China’s head. “No? Kind of. There’s a part of me that is really calm and really accepting and one with the universe or whatever, who’s okay with living with all these choices that I’ve made and the fact that I’m a sick person and I’m going to be sick for the rest of my life, but then there’s another part that’s always screaming at me because oh my God! What if I fucked up my whole life and Kory’s whole life and Jem’s whole life moving us halfway across the world? What if being sick ends up losing me my job and my house or my life, even, depending on how bad it gets? What if… where did all that potential go, the potential to go through life talking to people and making plans and raising my kid and being in a relationship without feeling like my head is on fire like fifty percent of the time? Is it gone? Will I ever know what my life could have been like if I hadn’t hit the genetic-environmental lottery and ended up like this?”

“No, you won’t.”

Mako looks at China.

China looks at him, twisting her inky hair into a loose bun that rests at the nape of her neck.

“You’re right.”

“I know.” China smiles, a Mona Lisa knowing whisper of a thing. “That part of you that you’re talking about – that voice? Don’t be afraid to sit down with it and love it, okay? Because that’s all it wants. It’s just scared and in need of some reassurance. That voice isn’t you.”

“Uh, I’m pretty sure that by definition it  _ is  _ me.”

“I’m pretty sure that by definition you aren’t your illness, and that voice is. It isn’t you, Mako. It just happens to live with you.”

Mako casts his eyeballs heavenward. “Choice roommate.”

“All it wants is love.” China retrieves another Kleenex from the box atop her thigh and tweaks with it her pale, button nose. “Whenever it starts screaming at you, just talk very gently back.”

That night, Mako opts out of cooking dinner to lie in bed for two hours, curled around Jem’s usual pillow while his family negotiates their culinary choices in his absence. Internally, silently, he berates himself for his selfishness, for his unforgivable abandonment of two grown-ass adults and one adolescent in favor of indulging his own depressive urge to block out every moving, breathing aspect of the world for a little while, for his inability to last an entire week without slipping into that inevitable pit of exhaustion and incompetency – why can’t he get his shit together, he wonders. Why isn’t he normal?

He sits up in the bed and finds his dim, gently warped reflection in the small television across the room.

“I love you,” he says to it.

His reflection simply stares back. Later, eating Mum’s Māori take on ratatouille from a plastic yellow bowl while Kory tries to get him to feature in her Snapchat story, he feels slightly less than frenzied. He’ll have to thank China for everything next week.


	3. 03

#  _ 3 _

Rui Whetū Ngata, an Aries, was born at 9:05 AM on April 11, 1948 with her umbilical cord tied around her neck, gently, yet with undeniable certainty, choking her. She came into this world the same day her uncle Arapeta “Harry” Ngata – former lieutenant of the Māori Battalion, partaker of hakas in the sands of El Alamein and co-owner of the general store, affectionately dubbed  _ Te Whare _ – went wheezing out of it with a hairy hand clutching his left chest, saying things like, “Oh, damn,” and, “Where’s Keegan?” She was delivered in the claw-foot bathtub in the newest farmhouse in Raukokore, the one freshly inherited by her mother Wikitoria “Victoria” Ngata and her aunt Moerangi "Molly" Ngata. Daddy, a handsome, heavily-built, rather Jovian drifter, went to prison the day of her conception and hadn’t been back since. He’d never come back.

Rui’s star sign was a prophecy. On her first day of life, she picked her own head up to look, bleary-eyed, into her tired mother’s face. She saw eyes, she saw nose, she saw mouth. She saw the whole landscape of her emotional development over the next fifteen years in these things. Within two years she was a wild ram-like baby girl, stubborn and full of anger, tumbling off the front porch to run around the yard with her sheep brethren, to horseplay with her best friend Ray Charles – the lamb born merely a year after she was.

Did you know that sheep are considered lambs for the first twelve months of their lives? Thereafter they are referred to as mutton. Rui always loved the mutton more – their big, cloudy bodies speckled with dirt and their way of looking down at her as if she were merely a weirdly-shaped child of theirs, just a lamb without wool, walking (mostly) on two legs with a malformed, smoothish larynx that tried hard to make baaing sounds and only came out with words, of all things. “Hello,” she’d say. “Big yawn,” she’d say. “Nigh-night,” she’d say. Then she’d be carried back into the house and all the grass would be picked out of her wooly hair.

When she was three years old, Rui Ngata fell headfirst off the front porch, and the impact of the descent forced her left eyeball from its socket. The night before she’d dreamed of roaming a big, empty  _ whare _ with two doorways – one facing north and the other facing south. When Victoria found her, kneeling in the dirt with her eye hanging on merely by its own gory, pink thread, she simply took care to wipe the tiny globe clean with the soft inner lining of her T-shirt and pop it back into her daughter’s head. To this day, Rui’s left eye lilts just off to the side – a reminder of her juvenile life and the unruliness it entailed. Growing up, she spent the mornings bottling goat and sheep’s milk and stirring cheese curds in the kitchen with her mother, then swam her afternoons away in the Raukokore River with Paxton Kokoro, the kid from just down the road with the always-abysmal haircut. They fancied themselves as the embodiments of their ancestors’ rich marine dreams and attempted during their playdates to rip fish from the water with their bare hands or with homemade spears fashioned from old broom handles. In the early evenings when they’d wrestle like boys or sit together in Rui’s front yard making mud pies while Victoria and Molly peeled potatoes for the boil-up on the porch, the women would joke that the two of them would be married and with children someday, they’d even wager money on it.

And Rui, a whopping eight years old, was sorry.

Rui was not marrying young and wasting her life away making cheese, cranking out youngsters, and playing house in Raukokore.

Rui was going to do like the men did and run away to the city to make something of herself, to learn and grow and spurn romance with every coolheaded, masculine act. 

When Paxton tried to kiss her wetly on the mouth seven years later, she turned her head to the left and said, “No, thank you.”

Naturally, she moved to Wellington as soon as she could. 

At Victoria University, the Pākehās began the trend of calling her Lucy. In courses on cells and heredity and comparative anatomy of vertebrates, her hand became a near-permanent fixture in the air. The loves of her life were the wicker rocker adorned with the afghan crocheted by her mother in which she spent hours upon hours reading textbooks and working calculus, and Tamati Jury – a delightfully flamboyant writing major who roamed the campus as a sort of late ‘60s pariah, with too feminine an angle to his hips and too high a lilt to his voice to be taken seriously by any of the university’s major subcultures and social groups.

Rui knew Tamati better. Not better than anything or anyone in particular, simply better. He knew her better in turn, knew her so much better that when she began dating Ansel Lovejoy in such horrifyingly normative, such satisfying yet utterly boring fashion – when she began to forfeit her right to paying for her own dinner in the face of Ansel’s hypermasculine desire to “take care of his girl, baby” and lost her virginity in possibly the most mediocre and vaccination-fast instance of coitus known – he’d given her such a legendary side-eye that made her nearly die at her own embarrassment of herself, at her embodiment of the very thing she’d sworn as an eight year-old to detest. She’d used Tamati’s house phone to break things off with Ansel, then went to eat syrupy chocolate ice cream from the carton and shit-talk professors with Tamati in the kitchen until they grew so tired they stumbled off to crawl into the same bed, to listen to Judy Garland albums until they fell blissfully asleep.

In the late summer before her senior year, Tamati took her to meet his grandmother – a stately Māori woman with  _ tā moko  _ on her chin and lips. For laughs and for the old woman’s sake, they’d pretended to be engaged, laid out for the elder Jury their fake plans for a wedding in spring and their fake dating history through the past three years of undergraduate and their not quite fake adoration for each other, clasping their manly hands together on the sofa and staring like moony teenagers into each other’s eyes, but then, when Tamati had stepped out to the bathroom and left Rui and his grandmother alone, the elder woman had glanced at Rui over her coffee and said, so casually it was painful, “You know he  _ wahine tane _ , right? What Pākehās call that? A fruit?”

Rui had stared into her own cup of coffee – insanely pissed, if we’re being honest – and thought of her mother back in Raukokore, herding the sheep and riding horses over the hilltops. What would she have said if she brought Tamati Jury home with her?

She experienced an awakening that year. She was tracked to become an immunologist – to float through undergrad into medical school and then some upstanding residency in Wellington or Auckland – but then she and Tamati took a plane to Sydney two weeks before the fall semester began and dipped by the aquarium a whole three decades before the craze of  _ Finding Nemo _ . There she witnessed the strangeness of creation. She saw analogous body parts and graceful morphologies that spoke some visual, musical language to her – the fluid pinwheeling motions of octopi; clownfish and their oddly human behaviors with regard to the sea anemones they made their homes, compulsively bathing when too many onlookers came to watch; the weird flying carpet manta rays with Rorschach-blotted oversides and lightly speckled undersides; the tiniest fish she’d ever seen in her life, darting through the water like cute little roaches, painfully unaware of their status as critically endangered (and how anything so small could be endangered, Rui had no idea). Her life stretched out in front of her as a calm, exquisitely blue quilt, unbloody, with no IV bags, no EKG beeping, no beds with wheels on them. Just lots of water, and so many lifeforms it dizzied her.

In the shark walk, she saw him. An elegant knife of a fish, with big black eyes and a sheen of silver all over. He looked mean. He looked terrified. She wouldn’t have gone so far as to say that he looked like her, or even like how she felt, but even in his alienness as a shark, his astounding projection of such human emotion – or, perhaps more accurately, Rui’s projection of human emotion onto him – made her want to know everything about him, made her love him like he might have been her own, all big-mouthed and pointy-toothed.

Scientists had named him for the Māori word for shark – a  _ mako shark _ .

When the semester for the fall of 1969 began, Rui dropped Biology of Fishes and its associated lab into her schedule. She graduated an aspiring ichthyologist with plans to hurry on into grad school and share a rental property with Tamati, who wasn’t getting published and wasn’t getting laid and was hanging himself in his grandmother’s bathroom a week after the semester concluded, leaving nothing but an agonizingly short and sweet voicemail on Rui’s phone all the way in Raukokore – “Just tell Lucy I love her, okay? She’s the wildest girl ever.”

Rui hadn’t even known his suffering was that dire.

For the first half of the 1970s, she lived in a bungalow on Karori Road with Anais Studwick – a fellow grad student studying organic chemistry who used ballpoint pens as hairsticks and invariably spoke in a very much inside voice – and Veranoa Ray – a mathematics major who looked every inch the Māori Hedy Lamarr, tall and classically beautiful. Despite her childhood desire to exemplify the essence of masculinity, there was something about women – born neurologically identical to and yet made socially other from men – that made more sense to Rui, that put her in an infinitely calmer, crazier mental space. It wasn’t just Veranoa. It wasn’t the specific fall of her hair over her uniquely thin, bronzy shoulder when she did the dishes; the fact that among Māori of the double-X inclination, her body type tended in rare fashion toward spindly rather than substantial. It wasn’t just her insistence on calling Rui by her birth name instead of by that Pākehā corruption Lucy – “Good morning, Rui,” in the kitchen and “Excuse me, Rui,” in the bathroom and, “Do you mind if I change the channel, Rui?” on the living room couch, before she reached with long arms over Rui’s lap to fetch the remote from the sofa’s polyester arm and in doing so sent Rui into a bit of a personal frenzy. It wasn’t just her hoarse, jazzy voice and all of its sinfully low octaves, or the way she’d sit cross-legged at her personal chalkboard with her hair a knot on the top of her head, chalk on her fingers and chalk on her face while she slaved over holomorphic functions and drew friendship graphs – it wasn’t just these things that made sense to Rui. They were quite notable factors in her world’s repertory of woman-things, however.

Rui and Veranoa slept in separate bedrooms for three months before deciding to end that arrangement. “You’re just like a Teddy bear,” is what Veranoa had said to Rui over late night cups of cramming coffee, triggering the first tentative women’s kissing and the first tentative women’s touching that began laying the groundwork for their intimate relationship. When Rui thinks about it nowadays she’s not too sure whether Veranoa had been referring to her attractiveness as a potential cuddling partner or to her heavyset, ursine build, but she’s not too sure it even matters. Her beauty was beauty to another person. Her womanhood made sense to Veranoa. 

Theirs was a relationship that exposed the cyclical nature of Rui’s condition – ripped it right open, in fact. Together they cycled between sleeping in Rui’s bed or in Veranoa’s, between evenings spent almost in their entirety engrossed in their own research and in their own coursework and then late nights with their limbs stuck together like wet noodles in the bathtub, or their bodies trapped in mutual orbit around both each other and the midnight meals they’d prepare in the kitchen. They cycled in and out of public and private modes of being together, into standing a respectful two inches away from each other when waiting in coffeehouses and leaning their heads together to whisper not the usual stuff of female friendship, but things like, “I would be kissing you right now,” and then going home and lying all over each other in Rui’s bed, stripping down to their underwear not to make love but simply to touch the organs of their skins together like one was made of oil and the other was cracked and dried, begging for the release provided by some salve. Veranoa would pluck Rui’s bra strap like the string of a guitar and laugh – never giggle – and say something like, “I could sail across the Tasman in this thing, my dear.” And then there would be another cycling. 

If it was a good day – a day when Rui could feel her head floating about six feet over its normal position five feet and three inches above the ground, when the words came lubricated from between her lips and flew out faster than she could even hold them in her mouth, how wonderful they were – she’d break down in gut-busting, toe-curling laughter, would take Veranoa around the middle and hold her against her body and kiss her all over her face and neck, saying, “You could, and you would,” before devolving again into sounds typical of rowdy children.

If it was an okay day – a day where everything existed in its usual place and Rui didn’t feel like she was high on herself, just herself – she’d just smile, would maybe even reach behind her back to unhook the aforementioned bra and let her 36Gs slip out into the open air, and let Veranoa do whatever she wanted with them.

If it was an unspeakable day, though – a day when the angle of the sun at any given time was offensive and the noise of Anais puttering around in the living room made Rui homicidal and any eye contact, any contact at all, felt like a challenge – her eyes would go shark dead and she’d turn her upper lip to stone and say, “How about not calling me my dear if you’re going to shit all over me?” The ensuing tirade would last for hours on those days, and Rui always managed to win the arguments she started.

These explosions occurred one to two times a month. In retrospect, Rui isn’t sure how Veranoa continued to stand her after the first two or three of them. In retrospect, she relistens to the ugly things she’d say to this woman, the third real love of her life – things like, “You know these Pākehās only like you because you’re pretty and skinny like them,” and “I don’t even know why I waste my time speaking to you when you understand practically nothing I say” – and cringes so hard she sinks deep into the earth, trapped there for hours, thankful to be medicated now and thankful that she and Veranoa parted on mostly amicable terms, with Rui a newly-minted doctor of ichthyology and Veranoa a mathematician on her way to MIT for a research job. She wonders now if she searched, would she find Ms. Ray still in America working at her chalkboard – perhaps a whiteboard, now – still sapphically inclined and still maybe a little in love with her? She does not search.

Rui was a doctor in 1974. Being called one by students at the age of twenty-six felt mystifying. She gained her faculty position in the biology department of Victoria University upon successful completion of her dissertation concerning the endothermic constitution and heat-exchange circulatory system of  _ Isurus oxyrinchus _ , otherwise known as the shortfin mako shark; here she taught Developmental Biology and Intro to Marine Sciences for ten years before her life changed again and she found another kind of love that made sense to her.

His name was Ezra Gehringer. She met him at the urging of a couple of mutual friends. Paola, Rui’s field and teaching assistant with a vertiginously high voice and an unhealthy interest in the lives of others; and her relatively new husband Dick Carpenter, the owner, hilariously enough, of a contract labor agency and one of Ezra’s long-time drinking buddies; arranged for the two of them to meet for a drink at a bar in Oriental Bay and, hopefully, make a connection. Rui had been gunning against it from the jump. She’d had too much on her plate teaching and researching and preserving her careful routines like ancient stone walls built up against the armies of mania and major depression; the last thing she needed was to start dating some divorced bookbinder with a two year-old child from a previous marriage.

Upon picking a booth, Ezra offered to take her coat. Rui had learned her lesson with Ansel; she smiled a non-smile and said, “I’ve got it.”

Ezra did not order her drink for her; a promising sign after the initial display of unattractive chauvinism.

Ezra spoke with chin inclined gently into his clavicle, as if he were scared to let the sounds he produced float unobstructed by nose and forehead into the ceiling, where they could collect and stare down at him as reminders of the painful history of his attempts at conversation. His left ear was pierced but free of any adornment or aberration save the puckered little hole in the lobe. When Rui pulled her long, wooly hair out of its professor’s bun – untwisting the tresses outward and to the right until they fell across her shoulders and into the side of her face like the semi-sheer threads of a curtain – Ezra followed every movement with his eyes like he was trying to memorize this mundane act of hers for later, to jot it down, to record it. This reminded her of Tamati, the writer.

“You know I’m not supporting this,” she said in her hushed-loud-because-she’s-in-a-bar voice. “I’m just doing this so my TA will finally stop pestering me about how I need to get out and meet new people. I don’t need to meet new people. I have a perfect number of people already in my life. I don’t understand what kind of calculus she’s using, how she came up with this mystical number – that she won’t reveal to me, by the way – of additional people I need to have sitting on some shelf in my house, or in my address book, whatever. I’m not saying all this because of you, okay, you know that, right? It’s nothing personal. I just have a whole lot going on in my life and I don’t really have time for a relationship. It’s just my thing.”

The bartender came around to deposit their two bottles of Speight’s on the table, then darted away.

Ezra immediately began to peel with his thumbnail the label, wet with condensation, off his beer. In a gentle and acquiescing tone, he said, “That’s okay.”

Rui frowned. “You’re not offended, are you?”

Ezra’s face – a blank, slightly moist sheet of paper – crumpled then into an expression of cottony laughter, all of the emotion suddenly there without warning and without any of the accompanying noise. He looked at her with his mournful brown eyes and said, “You’ll have to be a hell of a lot meaner to accomplish that.”

She blinked. “Is that a challenge?”

He curled the corner of his lips just upward. “It’s whatever you want it to be, honestly.”

A man had never talked to her like that before – kindly, sillily, with gentle yet firm respect for both himself and for her. No man in the world had even come close, except perhaps one glaringly dead one.

She guessed she was wrong about the exact contents of her plate. Maybe it was the dark chocolate timbre of Ezra’s voice. Maybe it was the fact that he was Jewish, and she as a Māori had so much to commiserate about with a similar, yet different victim of racial subordination. Maybe she was just having a particularly clear day. 

When they left the bar after their two Speight’s, rain came down in room temperature sheets. It was so stupid, so romantic comedy,  _ Casablanca _ -clichéd, but neither of them were genre savvy enough to care. Ezra began to offer Rui his jacket, then gave her a knowing, oblique look and murmured, “I think you can handle a little moisture.”

“You bet I can,” she’d replied.

Then they walked together beneath the dark, lachrymose sky, strangely open and different and together in that moment in their nearly middle-aged lives.

To this day, Rui would describe Ezra as the first and only adult she ever dated, as a wealth of mahogany Thursdays, as Earth itself. Before him, and after Veranoa, when Rui would dip her toes into the Wellington dating scene of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, she’d come screaming back out onto dry land due to the intensity of her career and the immaturity, superficiality, and dishonesty of the biting fish – qualities that perhaps had something to do with the age difference between her and the swimmers she attracted (there is an infamous story of the time she dated an adorable, frizzy-haired, ice-skating, neon-clad woman for four weeks before discovering, to her horror, that she was still in high school). Ezra, on the other hand, had firm hands that belied his even firmer convictions and never flinched in the face of her own rather brutal honesty, which he doled back out to her in turn.

“I don’t have time to just lie around; I have work to do.”

“Then I’ll do my work as well – deal?”

“That tie is absolutely atrocious, you know.”

“I’ll take my tie and raise you your blouse.”

Rui Ngata and Ezra Gehringer found that they fit into the vacant spaces within each other. They were two adults in that particular phase of life that necessitated disappearing off into work and/or deep introspection at least once every other week, after which they – with the presence of mind that came with their mutual honesty and genuine exhaustion – arrived back at each other’s doorsteps without hating or interrogating the other, just bestowing small gifts of flowers or chocolate fish and going to sleep in the same bed with arms wrapped around each other. They’d spend two weeks apart – Rui grinding her students through the wringer of finals with very little mercy and very much love, Ezra toiling to restore Mrs. Jane Latimer’s Dostoyevsky canon with careful applications of glue and thread – then return to their twosome with dancing at Boogie Wonderland on Courtenay and the imbibing of stupid “Polynesian” drinks. They’d practically forget about each other in the hurricanes of their separate lives, then intentionally remember themselves in lunch hour meetings filled with rugelach (Ezra’s favorite pastry) and birds of paradise (Rui’s favorite flowers). They’d be so freaking cute it was unbearable when they’d take weekend trips to Queenstown to rent a cabin and boat on Lake Wakatipu and take hikes during which their palms kissed pretty much always; when Rui would look at the two of them as if from a distance and smile dreamily at their maturity, at their practical compatibility with each other, at her once horrifying fulfillment of that very conventional desire to just be with a man who loved and respected her like Paxton Kokoro might have had Rui been able to stand being in backwater Raukokore past the age of eighteen. When Ezra took her for the first time to meet Robin, his two year-old son, Rui knew immediately that she could be part of this man’s family. Not only could she, but she wanted to.

It was only a matter of time.

On January 6 th , 1986, Rui woke up on the first Monday back at work after the holidays feeling undeniably seasick. She checked herself, peering over the edge of her bed to make sure, crazily, that it hadn’t become a boat overnight, that the carpet was the carpet and not the sea. Upon her assessment of the normality of everything in her world, she got up, peed, and then went on with the usual routine of her weekday mornings. The feeling of seasickness passed, and she didn’t think about it for the rest of the day.

The next morning, on January 7 th , she actually threw up. Over the side of the not-boat, right into the not-sea. An overachiever until the very end, she pressed on to work and made bihourly trips to the bathroom to kneel over the toilet and breathe hard into the bowl until the feeling of intense nausea eventually went away, then stepped back into class with not a hair astray, saying, “First person to get question one on the board correct gets ten bonus participation points.”

When on January 8 th , Rui awoke feeling like her breasts – already quite large and heavy by normal standards and on normal days – weighed about ten-thousand extra pounds, she spent her lunch hour scheduling an emergency appointment with her gynecologist, considering the birds of paradise on her desk.

Dr. Le called and missed her at work on January 13 th . On January 20 th – after two weeks of queasiness and inexplicable fatigue and questioning looks from Ezra and Paola and the whole host of her coworkers, the gynecologist got her on the phone and brought her attention to the tiny stranger currently residing inside her. Rui thanked him, hung up, and immediately dialed Ezra’s house phone to relay the news.

“Oh,” he’d said – a sound of dull surprise. Rui couldn’t blame him for the less than keen, less than expectant reaction; sex, after all, was far from the focus of their relationship, and while this she didn’t exactly enjoy, she believed she understood it as the natural order of a connection between two people their age.

“Can I see you tonight?” she’d asked, trying for staunch-yet-serene and coming out a little bit desperate.

“Um,” Ezra said. There was the sound of papers shifting over the phone, then an ambiguous low scraping noise. “I don’t know. I’ll call you later.”

Then she got the dial tone, and she sat in her office almost helpless to the rising tide of manic rage fast approaching her. She couldn’t even take her lithium anymore, thanks to the baby.

The birds of paradise hit the bottom of the rubbish bin with a soft  _ splat _ .

That night, Ezra came to her smelling like whiskey and smiling so big it made her stomach flip. He didn’t apologize for his inappropriate telephone behavior from earlier, but he crawled into her bed with her with all his street clothes still on and kissed her face, her hair, her neck, her shoulders, her hands, her wrists, and yes, her stomach, until she drifted away on that boat with him into a realm filled with nothing but space, where cherubim flew through the sky drenched and dripping with blood, crying, “ _ Whakamiharo! _ Victory!  _ Whakamiharo! Whakamiharo! _ ”

The pregnancy was a high risk one, owing to Rui’s nearly ripe age of thirty-eight. Dr. Le ordered amniocentesis done at the beginning crest of her second trimester, to scan the fetus for the genetic abnormalities it would be especially prone to. Laid out on her back like some humongous beached whale during her ultrasound, with her abdomen slathered with translucent blue jelly and Ezra hovering just over her shoulder damn near petrified with anxiety as he always was during her pregnancy (at least when he wasn’t intoxicated), Rui watched the static on Dr. Le’s monitor shift around until it materialized into a familiar roundness, tiny and primitive yet obviously human.

“There it is,” Dr. Le murmured. “Oh– there  _ he _ is, sorry.” He reached with one gloved index finger to indicate the teeniest, peanut-shaped protrusion just above the curve of the fetus’ hindquarters. “Look at that. A little wee-wee!”

Rui did not appreciate the childish euphemism. She felt, instead of thrilled or awestruck or even irritated by Dr. Le, tired. She looked at her half-formed son and felt acutely the weight of thirty-eight years on this earth, felt everything on her to-do list before the baby came pressing deep into the sinews of her lower back, felt the demand to remain sane for the next nineteen years when it was hard enough keeping it together for herself, felt tired.

In the car, with Ezra’s hands quaking on the wheel just enough to be noticed by Rui, she turned to him and asked, “Why are you so nervous? You’ve done this before.”

Ezra momentarily statued before pressing on through the intersection, never tearing his eyes from the road stretched out before them. “I’m not very good at it,” he replied.

“You’re amazing with Robin. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m amazing now. I can talk with him now. What happens when Robbie grows up? What happens when he starts deciding who he is and I stop understanding, because we’re not talking about shapes and colors and meals anymore, it’ll be – I don’t know. Politics. Identity. His… his friends, which I never had? I don’t know how to talk to a teenager, Ru–”

“I think,” Rui interjected, reaching over to lay her hand atop Ezra’s right thigh. “I think you’ll figure it out.”

“Yes, fat chance.” Ezra was reaching for the emergency pack of clove cigarettes in the glove compartment. “I’m a mess. You know this.”

Rui did. She knew of the paralyzing neuroticism that hushed Ezra’s voice, that steered him away from crowded places and kept him wide awake at night, agonizing over the various social interactions of the day and picking every word of them to carrion-like pieces. She knew of his tendency to self-medicate with whiskey and scotch in the event that his apprehension got the better of him and began to fray him like old rope. She knew there was only so much of others he could handle in a day before he grew unspeakably depressed and began to wither in every sense of the word. She knew.

Ezra had lit his cigarette by then and was smoking it out of the window, rolled down. He was saying, “I’m going to ruin Robbie. I’m going to ruin our son, too. He’s lucky he’s a boy; if he were a girl, it’d be so much worse–”

“Mako.”

“What?”

Rui felt idly at where she was slowly ballooning in the middle and examined a jellyfish-shaped cloud drifting by in the mid-afternoon Saturday sky. “I want to name him Mako. That’s the Māori work for shark. I did my dissertation on sharks, you know. Mako sharks.”

Ezra, for the first time that day, cracked the barest hint of a smile. Ashing his cigarette out of the open window and lifting her hand from his thigh to kiss its toasted brown palm, he said, “That sounds like a plan.”

It took her two more months to get excited. The logistics and stipulations of having a child were just so tedious for so long – all the meticulous meal-planning and biweekly visits to Dr. Le’s office and shopping for the ridiculous volume of things demanded by almost all modern, consumerist havers of babies: baby monitors and baby slings and both a convertible crib-cum-toddler bed and a bassinet, and clothes and mittens and clothes and bibs and clothes for every three-month interval of the first year of Mako’s life, and a high chair and a nursing bra and a stroller and nearly enough diapers to fill the entire trunk of her car, and, and, and so much money spent sometimes Rui actually sat in front of her steering wheel and wept after her shopping trips. What was she going to do but disappear beneath the immense gravity of Mako?

On May 29 th , a Thursday, she stepped out of the shower and, as soon as both damp feet were firmly on the tile, felt a fluttering within her that stole the breath from her lungs. She stood in the bathroom that would soon no longer be hers after she moved into the new house with Ezra – dripping wet, naked, orcaesque in both temperament and shape – and experienced her very first quickening with close to zero cognitive content. It was almost all emotion. Mako was officially a thing – a person. She suddenly very much wanted to meet him.

The following week, she sat upright in her and Ezra’s new, shared bed and looked at her sleeping companion with the whole of the past and the future sitting plainly on her face – a panorama of time reflected plainly in her eyes – and she said to him, looking for an interlude to connect these two chronological chapters, “Should we get married?”

It was a question they’d failed to both ask and address since the first day they’d known about the baby, but it had trailed faithfully behind them ever since, growing in volume until it was no longer some silent, unspoken whisper, but there in their laps and ringing loud and clear in their ears – should they get married?

Because it was the truth, Ezra smiled and replied, “I don’t want to marry you because you got pregnant.” If they married then, it would always be because Rui got pregnant. They both deserved so much more than that. 

So, they turned off all the lights and laid beside each other in bed with Ezra’s strong nose pressed softly into the curve of Rui’s shoulder and his hand draped gently over the outward curve of her belly. They bid Wellington a silent goodnight – unengaged, but probably loving each other than they had ever known how to. Five months later, that love came to fruition – after the garish baby shower thrown for them by the Carpenters, after painting the nursery walls a blue called Hawaiian Ocean, after weeks of bedrest and nine months lithium-free – something made sense again. It was always all about making sense.

Mako Kahurangi Gehringer, a Libra, was born at 9:00 PM on the dot on October 5 th , 1986 with his umbilical cord tied around his neck, just like his angry ram momma. When he was rid of his neonatal clothes of amniotic fluid, blood, and vernix caseosa, Rui held him in her big bear arms, ass-kicked and exhausted from fourteen hours of labor and yet stronger and more awake than she’d ever felt in her almost forty years alive. She looked at him – an actual thing, a weird thing, a beautiful thing she’d made in her body with the help of the man she loved – and she concluded right then and there that she couldn’t let him go, not even when she went back to work. She’d carry him curled up into her chest with the aid of – you guessed it – the baby sling, or, when he was a bit older, propped up on her hip while she zipped around the biology department and her office, signing off on grants and making business phone calls and conversing with her coworkers, who marveled always at his full head of hair and the planetary roundness of his eyes. By his second year, her office was his office too. 

Momentarily distracted from the letter to the dean she was composing at her desk, Rui would peer at him lying belly-down on his quilt across the room, drawing (somehow) perfect circles on a steno pad with his favorite blue crayon.

“Mako?” He’d look right up when she said his name like that, the word all drippy with curiosity and affection, and she’d grin the silliest, stupidest grin imaginable in reply. She’d say, “I love you.”

Mako would swiftly return to his geometrical task, but not without murmuring, “Luh you,” back. For a moment that lasted for five more years, Mako was the most important person in the world.


	4. 04

#  _ 4 _

#    
  


Two days after his birthday, Mako comes to work in his T-shirt he likes to call his “T-shirt that has been on Earth the longest” – his T-shirt that used to belong to Nana Victoria with the rubberized bits of THE WHOLESOME FAMILY COOKIE COMPANY • TAURANGA, NZ • 7 592 8355 peeling off in small, scarlet flecks – and a pair of blue straight leg jeans with gaping holes bleeding white, fibrous threads in the left thigh and right knee. In a regularly scheduled moment of restlessness and deep dissatisfaction with the status quo, the editor in chief has decided to repaint the entire  _ Endymion  _ office, citing the need for “a seminal workplace environment” and “a healthy dose of change.” Being as backwater-born, Opelousas-stingy as Priya is, however, she has insisted that every editor and staff writer do the dirty work of painting their own respective offices and the hallways surrounding them in lieu of hiring actual professional painters.

“ _ WEAR YOUR SHITTIEST CLOTHING _ ,” her last-week memo had said in capital, sans-serif red letters. Mentally, Mako had earmarked on the spot his stupidest-cutest painter chic outfit, then proceeded to gleefully anticipate Jem’s reaction to it for the next five days – finally culminating in this morning, when Jem squinted at him over his cup of coffee and remarked, “You look like a hobo.”

Mako pouted like a teenage girl. “An  _ adorable _ hobo.”

“Well, yeah.” Jem – very stubbly, pajama-clad, not too far from hoboness himself in his early morning state – gave him the wryest of smiles. “That’s a given, though.” Then he kissed him with slightly more force than the morning warranted, and Mako’s expectations were only just barely fulfilled.

Annie, his editorial assistant of the past eight years, is already in their shared office when Mako arrives, wearing overalls and covering his desk with a custard-colored drop cloth. Mako makes a show of pressing his hand into his left chest as he walks in the door, crying out, “Lord, what do we have here? Annie of the Chinese mafia!”

“Good morning!” Annie chirps, five feet and six inches of unadulterated happiness. Rubbing a hand over her insanely charming buzz cut, she motions toward the little wooden tray set out on her own drop-clothed desk, on which sits their designated at-work kitten-themed mugs. “I made you some coffee. I hope you like Hawaiian blend; that was the only kind left in the kitchen. You know how everyone loves that hazelnut–”

“I thought I told you never to make me coffee,” Mako interjects, going over and taking a sip from his calico cup regardless. “Or like, be assistantly in any way.”

“I’m naturally servile.” For emphasis, Annie doubles over in a deep, theatrical bow. “It’s my curse, being born female.”

“Eugh!” Mako darts a hand over to whack her lightly on the arm, smiling despite himself when she simply descends into adolescent giggles. “Don’t say that! It makes my skin crawl.”

Annie spiders her fingers briefly over the back of Mako’s hand in a droll imitation of the feeling he has just described. Mako just laughs. 

Together, editor and assistant empty their various bookcases of books, move said bookcases into the center of the room, and spread painter’s tape over the edges of the floor and ceiling. With a butter knife retrieved from the office kitchen, Mako opens the can of paint of his and Annie’s chosen color – “ _ Cloisonné _ ,” they utter to each other in unison, intonations overly French and romantic in nature – and then, with their feet naked against the plastic sheet on the floor, they dip their paint rollers into the deep, almost magic blue and work it in rectangular stripes over the boring taupe of the wall. 

“I went to mass yesterday,” Annie announces, apropos of nothing, a one-woman sunlamp in the warmth of her voice and her person. 

“Yeah?” Mako reaches his roller high up into the far left corner of the wall and curses under his breath when some of the paint gets on the ceiling. Oh well. It gives the room character.

“The hymns were really primary-colored this time.” Annie, at her end of the wall, has a meticulousness and a delicacy to her ministrations that Mako lacks in his perpetually distracted and impatient state. “Lots of pretty reds and blues and yellows.”

“What are you talking about?” Mako asks. “Did you go, like, high? Were you on acid? Because that actually sounds like a lot of fun.” He grins. “Maybe  _ I _ could be Catholic if I went to church high.”

“No, oh my God.” Annie gives him a somewhat wide-eyed look, asking without words if he’s crazy. “I’ve never told you that I’m synaesthetic?”

“Oh shit! You mean you’re one of those people who can hear colors and taste words?”

“I can hear colors, yes.” Annie lowers her paint roller into the paint tray, soaking the foam cylinder with vibrant blue hue. “Your voice is very purple – like bluish, indigo-purple, and bright.”

“ _ Ooh _ , I like that.” Mako pauses to observe the other’s work. “What color is Priya’s voice?”

“Actually?” Annie tucks her face against her left shoulder and whisper-yells the answer to him, so cutesy and so pure: “It’s black!”

“Get out.”

“You get out, I’m working.”

Mako stretches his roller across the room and paints a wide stripe up Annie’s side, her Omaha Tennis Club T-shirt and the faded, grayish denim of her overalls. She has a big-toothed smile and a loud, shrieking laugh that makes his intestines bleed through the skin of his abdomen, turns his heart into a warm slushie that he would gladly drink, had things in New Orleans turned out differently for him. In retaliation, Annie comes at him with her fingers dipped in paint, smearing cloisonné into his beard and across his lips. They finish painting the rightmost wall in a little under an hour. 

Annie was born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska; this, Mako knows. Like him, her childhood passed in imaginative and profoundly lonely fashion – his through countryside romps with sheep and goats and in a tiny Maori schoolhouse full of kids who physically resembled him and mentally couldn’t be farther from him; hers in the St. Mary Magdalene Catholic Church and through Sunday brunches with her sister the stickbug, her brother the blond, her thickly-stomached father the insurance salesman, and her mother, the most deeply frazzled and dewinged angel there ever was. 

Annie used to strain so hard to feel God that her spiritual muscles would snap with sharp, crackling noises. As a girl, she’d bury the glass canisters left over from scented candles filled with paper prayers in lieu of wax – A PRAYER FOR SAINT JUDE, THE PATRON OF LOST CAUSES, they’d have inscribed at the top, or A PRAYER FOR SAINT BARTHOLOMEW, THE PATRON OF BUTCHERS AND NERVOUS DISEASE – so shallowly in the dirt that within the week, the rain would uncover them and she would see them clean with moisture and dirty with mud all at once. Sometimes, the same prayer would get buried more than three times a month, because God lived in the Earth – in all things, really, but especially the Earth – and perhaps if she planted prayer deeply enough she would finally find It. Her. Him. Whatever They happened to be.

In the evening, Annie would lie with her prayers in the backyard, wearing her nightgown with the white chiffon ripples and a Jesus cross sewed by her grandmother into the yoke. Fall asleep listening for the Almighty One, the one who Loved her above all. Stay there curled up in the singing grass until her father came and carried her up to bed, shaking his head and kissing her face. Wake up the next morning to speak to God through every face she encountered – the ones in personal injury attorneys’ billboards, in movies on cable television – and through the voice that rose quiet and sweet out of her Rice Crispies. She doubted she’d ever get a reply, but she listened anyway, and this is how she knew she had faith.

The summers were desolate and girlish and spent making construction paper decorations for her bedroom walls, daydreaming her way through catechism classes about a Jesus who wore leather jackets and rode a Harley-Davidson, and riding in the backseat of her father’s car with her sister Ruthie, singing silently along to the songs on the radio. The autumns she went back to school, she ran through recess with boys she romanticized and misunderstood in equal measure and shunned the girls who glared at her with jealous eyes, who in their presupposed cliquishness frustrated her impossibly sensitive nature. In the winter of the year she turned eleven, God sent to her her mother’s perfect Christmas cookies, a crisp Nebraskan snowstorm, and Laura: the perfect friend, who looked into her soul and whose soul she could look into in turn. In the spring, she wrote poems in the margins of her homework and went to mass in colors like pastel yellow, blue, and pink; played volleyball with Laura in middle school gym class and came out as a vegetarian to her family.

“Annie, if you want to be skinny like your sister, just don’t eat as much,” her mother would say, looming over the pot of pork chops sizzling on the stove and designating the smallest one for her youngest child. 

“Annie, we’re not cancelling your birthday party just because you feel under the weather,” the elder Bailey would fuss up the stairs and in the direction of Annie’s room, where the girl had closed the door and gotten under the covers and put her hands over her ears to listen to nothing but the beating of her own hideous, enlarged heart.

“Annie, get in this house before it starts raining!” her mother would yell, watching Annie sit in the backyard with the family dog until she came back inside with her hands and fingers and fingernails encrusted with dry soil. 

“Annie, I don’t understand you sometimes,” her mother would snap, and then Annie would sniffle a little and the whole world felt devoid of sun for the entirety of the next week. 

There was something about adolescence that flipped a switch inside Annie’s brain. She secretly believed her mother, with her emotionless emotionality and tendency to regularly lose her shit in some domestically acceptable manner (by cleaning the house from top to bottom or furiously searching for and then discarding every unaccompanied sock in the laundry), had this switch flipped in her mind as well. Her father called it hormones or, if he was feeling particularly misogynistic, womanhood. Annie called it martyrdom, because it made her wholly alone in her conviction that everything in the world was wrong, that she herself was a wrong thing, that she had to go away for the sake of the ones she cared for, and off she went – walking through the featureless Nebraska suburbs until the sun had set and Ruthie had to drive around in Daddy’s car looking for her. 

“I just wanted to be alone,” she told her sister with her hair a soft brown curtain over her face. She told her parents the same thing. They frowned for weeks and weeks and brought her to Wednesday services in addition to Sunday ones.

By then, Annie had identified God in her bedroom and her brussels sprouts and her favorite Omaha coffee shop between Thirteenth and Fourteenth Street. It spoke without words, through bent rays of light and across synapses in her hands, hips, and feet. When Depression came swirling across her face like a southerly hurricane with a hook-shaped eye, Annie found that God’s voice became so quiet it was nearly imperceptible. Lying in bed, staring out of the window, and talking a one-sided conversation to Jesus (who did not sport a leather jacket anymore, but wore His hair long like the boys Annie liked so much at house parties), Annie was brought back to her silent childhood, when she did not hear anything but her mother fussing at her to get up and participate, for heaven’s sake. 

Was her suffering holy, she wondered.

She was a stupid, silly girl.

God was so happy to get her back when Depression gave her a break.

When she was sixteen she dated Anthony Kellinghusen, who everyone called Kelly. He took pictures of her dancing on train tracks, skipped his own high school graduation, and banged heroin in the men’s restroom at Sozo. Annie, of course, interpreted this series of auguries as signs that she had a mission – the very first mission given to her from above – to save Kelly from himself with her softness, her big heart, and her perpetually open ears. This mission persisted until Kelly overdosed in her parents’ downstairs bathroom and she stood sobbing in the doorway while the ambulance took him away. He lived in the end, but she’d failed in her mission, and her failure would haunt her for the next four years.

When she was seventeen, she dated Noah Alpiner after meeting him at Bea Witherwax’s basement rager, where he played the electric guitar and sung garage rock in the vein of FIDLAR. Noah, a white boy, wrote so-called “progressive” poetry about race, neglected to wash his hair for periods of up to three months, and made eye contact with Annie when other boys simply stared right into her forehead. With Noah, the mission was simply to fall in love and make a husband out of him through walks with him and Laura in downtown Omaha and in feverish mosh pits at rock music concerts, and things would have gone exceptionally, might have even resulted in a couple of greasy-haired, indie rock children, had Annie not woken up on the morning of February 3 rd , 2009 and realized that she knew next to nothing about who Noah really was; she’d only known him as dreamy and romantic and exceptional among boys: all things she’d just decided about him in the moment in which they met.

“Cool show,” she’d said to him once Bea had finally quit hovering and left them alone to go check on Janet Schulte, who was rumored to have been vomiting her guts out in the bathroom at the time.

Noah had looked at her – in his cool sweater, smoking his cool cigarette, wearing his cool hair down to his cool shoulders and prematurely gray – and replied, “Cool shirt.” He’d pointed at the puppy dog swimming in the sea of thin black stripes across her chest. “Is that a cocker spaniel? My grandma has two cocker spaniels. They’re cool. I like them.”

Annie had smiled. “I like them, too.”

_ Ç'est ca l'amour _ . That’s all it took.

So what if they only talked about the things that Noah wanted to talk about? So what if Noah, though not Kelly’s extreme brand of heroin addict, sold cannabis to the kids at Duchesne, Mercy High, Skutt, and Creighton U? So what if every attempt at intimacy collapsed into Catholic guilt and awkward stuttering and running to open the door so Annie’s parents wouldn’t flip out? So what if Annie wasn’t the manic pixie dream girl Noah thought her to be, and he wasn’t the softest and kindest dreamboat she thought him to be?

When they broke up, it was a Friday and the snow fell in fat white flurries that melted oh so dramatically into Annie’s hair and face upon contact. She cried as she did over abused Sarah McLachlan kittens and her mother’s most cutting comments in the mornings. By springtime, Laura had started dating Noah in her place and Annie had stopped talking to her best friend entirely in favor of wandering the suburbs alone again, letting her mother’s chicken legs go bad in the back of the refrigerator, speaking to a temporarily mute God through the Jim Morrison poster above her bed, and working on her applications to Creighton in Omaha and Loyola in New Orleans. 

When Annie poured these pieces herself out with the 9:00 PM coffee and teared up a little bit the second summer they knew each other, Mako – her boss who smoked cool cigarettes, prematurely grayed, and wore sweaters of superb thrift store quality – felt her liquefaction as he felt his own – the shared exquisite intensity of their being alive and feeling anything, any piece of shit high school Dramatic Event, everything, all the time; of having their heads almost always in flames.

“God, this is so embarrassing.” Annie had no problem taking the Lord’s name in vain when she was blowing her nose into a sandpaper napkin and sitting across from her boss in an Uptown Starbucks. She sniffled, asked “Where was I?” then continued.

At the age of eighteen, Annie caved to her parents’ desire to keep her close by and went to Creighton rather than Loyola. She lamented but did not regret being born a girl – bemoaned her supposedly girlish struggles and the supposedly girlish drama in her life, but decided she wouldn’t trade it for any alternate or apparently manly existence. For the first time in her life, when Depression came she did not simply apply scripture and God like a balm and then wait through the sobbing her eyes raw and the quasi-fugue states for conditions to eventually improve; instead, she went to the university’s LMSW and got diagnosed with major depressive disorder, for which she soon began to take a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor and attend weekly counseling sessions. She majored in English, hung out in boys’ dormitory rooms, read poetry aloud in the chapel with likeminded Jesuits, and staffed university retreats centered on finding God and strengthening community bonds. She studied abroad in France in the fall semester of her junior year, where she experienced such immense stress and such deep loneliness that she did not have her period for the five months that she was there. She lived in an abbey with Ursuline nuns and among the bleating of sheep considered becoming a nun herself, submitting to the methodical and quiet nature of a life married to God. She came back home and, to her mother’s great horror and her brother’s surprised admiration, shaved all of the long hair off of her head, citing everyone’s preoccupation with it in her life, years 0 to 21. She went to basketball games with Ruthie and her fiancé and made friends with Laura again, Noah Alpiner simply a very interesting whorl in the texture of her life.

The ghosts came out of the woodwork when she decided to move to New Orleans for real, forget her parents’ wishes for her safety and close keeping. Anthony Kellinghusen, who she’d only just gotten over, invited her to share a blueberry muffin the size of her heart at their old stomping ground, Sozo, the week before she left. As casual conversations with exes went, this one was pretty okay for a while – no real tiptoeing around the mutual heartbreak and unhealthy emotional and physical habits they had stacked between them, just real and frank talking about God (Annie revealed to the first man in her life, the way she revealed to Mako years later, the particular way It manifested in her life) and music (Kelly had recently started his own experimental music group, Grilled Cheese Grandmothers). 

Then Kelly said, “So, New Orleans?”

Annie, twenty-two and nearly bald, refrained from touching her own lipsticked mouth and replied, “Yep. New Orleans.”

Kelly laughed his really pretty laugh. “You’re gonna get eaten alive.”

This made Annie furious, and so filled up with determination that her spit turned to mercury. “Maybe so,” came her even response. She’d welcome it. It was her new mission in life: to get eaten alive.

On the surface, moving to New Orleans was about getting her master’s in English writing at UNO and then going on to some bigger, better place that would exist above sea level eighty years into the future. Underneath it all, though, there was buying her own groceries and walking the streetcar line and drinking at neighborhood bars and going to Wednesday night mass. There was picking up her prescriptions and flirting with men without guilt and paying some of the cheapest urban rent in the country and learning how to kiss, how to really kiss. There was getting her first actual job at a magazine that was fresh and whimsical and, at the time, brand spanking new on the market:  _ Endymion _ , the cream of the crop as far as quasi-literary publications in the south went. There was falling in love with the hot and wet wildness of this place at the Mississippi’s mouth – inadvertently gentrifying it, perhaps, but fitting her astral body somehow in the cracks in the settling pavement. 

On Tuesday,  _ Endymion _ ’s October 2024 issue goes to print. It is, for the most part, an average day at work, except Priya is – in her stressed and frazzled state – that much bitchier and that much more wired than she is every other day of her life. The first Mako sees of her on this very special Tuesday, she is stalking up and down the hallway, distributing memos into the plastic multicolored inboxes posted on each office door and jabbering on to everybody and nobody, all at the same time.

“Today is the day, kiddos. It’s crunch time. By eleven, all final drafts need to be sent to David. By twelve-thirty, final drafts are proofread – done! Two o’clock, sections formatted, sent to Dropbox. Three o’clock, we’re off to the printers. If I get asked any stupid questions today, I’m not responsible for what happens. You reap what you sow, my friends. I love a nice, Biblical turn of phrase. You know your jobs! I swear, you folks don’t have it bad. Don’t have it bad at all. You’re here, doing what you love to do and getting paid for it. Amazing! It’s astounding how hard it is for some of you to enjoy that. What am I talking about – it’s astounding how hard it is for me to enjoy that. I’m forty-three years old and I’ve had twelve ulcers. I’m probably working on thirteen and fourteen as we speak. I have all the zest for life of a cat bred to smell for cancer, who lives in a nursing home and eats off-brand wet food that doesn’t even try to approximate genuine meat. Jerri, when you pass me in the hallway, would you do me a favor and not look like you’ve just taken a massive shit? Thanks. Holy shit, where is Miss Sally? I thought I asked her for my coffee like three quadzillion years ago. Fuck, I need an assistant.” It is at this moment that Priya stops, zeroes in on Mako as he passes from his office into the hallway, and says to him in the instant that he’s crossing through the kitchen doorway, “Mako! Good morning.”

Suspicious, a little terrified, and trying hard not to show it, Mako doubles over in a brief, playful bow and replies, “Good morning, Priya.”

“I’m so proud of your article.” Abruptly, Priya raises her voice to a volume perceptible by anyone in the office with a working pair of ears and says, “You hear that, everybody?! I’m so proud of Mako’s article! That’s a hint!” Then she smiles at Mako, a chillingly beautiful flash of teeth, says, “I’m glad we had this chat,” and walks to her office at the end of the hallway, her heels clicking with every step. 

Mako turns to lock eyes with the only other person in the hallway: Kiev, the writer on staff who smells always faintly of whiskey and whose level of interpersonal goodness generally has a positive relationship with the hourly progression of the day. Being that it’s nine o’clock in the morning, Mako is not all that surprised to find the man’s eyes very obviously bloodshot and his facial expression caught at the intersection between surly and straight up exhausted.

“What?” Kiev snaps, curt, trailing the word with a noisy sip from his quite opaque thermos.

Mako does nothing but widen his eyes ambiguously and then look away, disappearing into the kitchen in search of java. He finds a lukewarm quarter of a pot of coffee left on the countertop and decides to take his chances.

It is the hour of nine o’clock. At ten, Kelsey surreptitiously filches the stapler from Jackson’s desk while he’s in Jerri’s office discussing with her the latest episode of  _ Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta  _ and why, oh why, the lineup on VH1 has gone to such shit in recent years. Priya yells at the printing press over the phone about due dates! synergy! and professionalism! and – while drinking mysterious and pungent liquids from the plastic Mardi Gras cup kept always on her desk and adjusting the dimensions of the neoclassical paintings of Greek deities on both of her desktop monitors – unpacks, plugs in, and sets up her new humidifier amidst a flurry of packing peanuts and instructions in English, Spanish, French, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Hindi.

At ten-thirty, Monica CCs an inspirational chain-email to the entirety of the office – “ _ Send this to 15 hardworking people you are thankful for! _ ” – and a distinct groan ripples through the workplace in reply, jumping from editor to editor and writer to writer, contagious, snowballing in size and volume. Monica, satisfied with her work as the managing editor, straightens the corny, distinctly Louisianan welcome mat on the floor just inside her office – BIENVENUE, says it in curly black letters, decorated with red tomatoes and even redder crawfish – then goes on to edit this month’s production schedule on her dinosaur Compaq from September 2008, praying that today won’t be the day that the computer decides to go blue-screened and unresponsive for good. 

At eleven, Jackie, the business editor and performer of all the office’s mundane and tedious bitch work, restarts the modem when everyone’s simultaneous attempts to send in their final drafts to David results in an incorrigible network traffic jam. Paul, the sports editor and resident hypoglycemic, munches on a granola bar in front of ESPN, while Kelsey, his editorial assistant, busies himself with all of the stapling he can now get done with his loot from the real estate editor’s office – stapling printed off calendars together and stapling a blue construction paper border to the bulletin board and stapling archived articles from the past ten months into one neat stack and stapling all of his at-work doodles into a makeshift sketchpad. The poppy red paint on the walls was a bad choice, he muses aloud – “Way too loud for an office. I have a headache just sitting here.” Paul just grunts, then peels open a second granola bar and turns the volume on the television from  _ 12 _ to  _ 15 _ .

At noon, David’s somewhat cryptic email makes the rounds – “ _ Back to the mothership in five, DS _ ” – followed by a significantly less cryptic series of emails with copy-edited, finally final draft attachments. Twelve-thirty and the office is aflutter with activity, editors and their assistants plugged into Lucidpress, speaking to one another the language of formatting – tab and text box and typeface, “Do we really need this sentence here? Yeah, let’s just get rid of it,” and “Will eight-point font even be legible on the printed product?”, and “No it won’t, so ten-point font it is.” 

One-thirty and Mako is smoking his vape pen outside with Hayden – who utters no words to him, favors American Spirit celadons, and appears most of the time as if he’s falling asleep standing up – and with Eryka – who does not stop speaking to him, smokes the heavy duty Djarum blacks, and acts like she’s high on something. 

“So I’m like, what the fuck, I turned the little notch – you know the little switch on the side of the phone? You have an iPhone, right? You seem like an Apple guy. I think I saw your laptop that one time we were in Priya’s office for the meeting, it was a MacBook. Shit, wouldn’t it be funny if you had a MacBook but then your phone was a fucking Android? That wouldn’t make like, any sense, but I swear to God it happens. There are people out there like that. Weirdos. Anyway. What was I talking about?” There is a long pause while Eryka considers her own question and Mako mostly welcomes the break.“Oh, yeah! My phone! I turned the little notch on, so I’m definitely supposed to hear sound, right? But every time I try to watch my friends’ Snaps or watch a video on Twitter I literally can’t hear shit! And I’m really fucking pissed at this point, I’m like, come the fuck  _ on _ , dude, I just want to listen to some John Mayer, goddammit, stop judging me, phone, let me live my fucking life, like,  _ fuck! _ I restarted my phone, nothing! I fucked with the settings, fuck all! So, yeah.” Eryka puts her cigarette between her lips and puffs. “I still don’t have sound.”

Mako, with eyes subtly blown out wide due to sheer sensory and social overload, sucks on the end of his own nicotinic accessory. “Did you factory restore your phone?” he asks. At his left, Hayden smooths a hand through his lank hair and coughs disinterestedly.

“No, dude, I have pictures on there,” Eryka snaps without seeming particularly irritable.

“You could upload them to Google Drive.”

Eryka levels him with a somewhat sheepish look beneath her mop of curly blue hair. “These aren’t the kind of pictures you just want floating around on the Internet,” she intones. Mako politely ends the conversation right then and there.

At two o’clock, Priya is wearing her cat-eye sunglasses indoors and offering in a kind of slurry voice to buy daiquiris for the whole office, because, as she says, “Daiquiri, coffee – what’s the difference?” In the hallway, Kelsey relays to the two unfortunate staff writers present in his totally not inside voice his desire to quit and start his own publication – because, as he says, “I like controlling other people.” Everyone acts like they haven’t heard him say it, but half an hour later, when Mako pops into the kitchen to get potato chips and some of that five-layer dip Naomi, the news editor, brought in to the office this morning out of the goodness of her own heart, he overhears the unmistakably Kelseyan exchange between Priya and Jackson:

“I can’t say anything about him without having to ask forgiveness when I get home tonight.”

“Right?” Jackson glances at Mako scooping guacamole and sour cream into a little Styrofoam bowl by the fridge and does not stop talking, nor does he lower his velvet Trinidadian voice. “I mean, I don’t hate him, but I can’t stand him.”

“He’s one of those people where if he’s in your life, you know you’ve done something wrong.” Priya gestures with the hand holding her Mardi Gras cup for emphasis, sloshing transparent liquid over the lip. “Karma is handing you a big roll of Charmin, saying, ‘Clean up your mistake, bruh.’”

“I think every day about when he was talking all about how he has his big fancy degree in communications, and I’m like, you can’t communicate shit! You can’t even get a good sentence out without offending someone!”

Kelsey does not believe in cancer or diabetes, his reasoning being that both conditions are too prevalent and too lucrative for the medical professions to be real. He was raised a Pentecostal woman in semi-rural south central Louisiana and once wore his hair so long it nearly brushed his buttocks. Nobody in the office cares much for him for reasons ostensibly unrelated to his gender identity or his faith, though he has steadily kept his job for eight going on nine years due to his continued adequacy regarding the ins and outs of editorial assistanthood. Just as Priya and Jackson’s mutual diatribe really begins to pick up steam, Mako excuses himself from the grossness of the kitchen, from the ancient coffee machine that Priya has insisted on keeping due to its supposed “cuteness” despite the editorial staff’s bitching and moaning for ecologically devastating Keurig; from the recycling bin that only half the office uses in spite of the increasingly threatening signs that are posted on the wall above it; from the nuclear warzone that is the microwave, encrusted with dried chili and crumbs from reheated pizza slices; from the hepatitic water heater everyone is afraid to use; from the sink full of unwashed dishes; from the half-rotted fruit in the bowl on the counter; from Naomi’s alkaline water machine; from sticky floors that cling weakly to the soles.

At three o’clock, Jackson is having a minor and hand-flappingly homosexual meltdown over his missing stapler and Kelsey is lurking at the open door of Naomi’s temporarily vacant office, looking for some other commonplace office supply to nab. There is music in the workplace: David Bowie in his New Romantic era, poppy synths, electric piano, soaring vocals, all streaming at maximum out of Jerri’s newly hot pink office. The issue is sent to the printers. The writers are eating hummus and egg salad. David, his job as copy editor effectively finished, is playing a whirlwind game of FreeCell. Miss Sally passes out fruity drink samples from the seafood grill next door, Priya’s treat. 

At three-thirty, Mako’s energy level takes a sharp dive and he wanders into the kitchen to make a fresh pot of coffee. The cerebral drain of working here being fairly maximal, he is left wondering for perhaps the eighth workday in a row how he’s going to make it through the last hour and a half of his day. When he returns to his office, drooping over his java and clearly a little crazy around the eyes, Annie drops on his desk a doodle of his “flowerself” – his face encircled by rose petals, his hands clever arrangements of leaves. Mako barely refrains from simply collapsing in delight and exhaustion, settles instead for blowing a very workplace-inappropriate kiss across the room to her. 

At four o’clock, Kiev is congratulating everyone for a top issue. Paul has moved on from granola and ESPN to Parmesan popcorn, Minute Maid, and Fox Sports. Priya’s office door is closed and she is undoubtedly napping behind it. Stanley is singing along to Jerri’s Marvin Gaye in the hallway, rousing Mako from his open-eyed coma as he sits at his desk typing absolute bullshit article ideas into a Word document. At her desk, Annie snacks unobtrusively on waffle chips and drafts a mock-production schedule that Monica will (hopefully) approve for the rest of October. The room still smells like paint, but that’s okay. Mako realizes that he forgot to water the hanging ferns this morning and decides that the whole day is shit. Jackson stops by to flirt a little and Naomi sets out to pick the recyclables out of the kitchen garbage.

At four-thirty, the editors begin to announce their intentions to call it an early workday and the staff writers are stirring in the writers’ room at the telltale signs of closing. 

At four-forty-five, Mako begins the process of shutting down his desktop and his laptop, of packing his things and shuttering his office windows. 

At five sharp, he looks at Annie – the sole person at  _ Endymion _ whose sanity and tolerability exceeds her creative madness or otherwise unbearably neurotic nature – and tells her, “Thank you.”

“For what?” she asks.

“For being you,” he says, smiling a tired smile at her when she smiles a grateful one at him. He locks their office door with the heavy brass key and walks with her until she reaches her car a block down.

That night, Mako is waist-deep in his typical nightly routine – half-entangled with Jem on the couch, shouting answers at the evening’s given episodes of  _ Family Feud _ and munching on hideously healthy snack food (tonight, it’s green grapes and pita chips) – when Annie texts him in the middle of the second commercial break.

#    
  


**Today** 8:49 PM

**annie bailey  
** i’m drunk at a hornets game (i was bribed into coming via a new sweater) and all i can think about is how i want to be reincarnated as a black lady

i love you??

oh my god forget i ever said that i’m so sorry

no really i never said it im drunk ok bye

#    
  


“Oh my God.”

“Wha-?” Jem glances at him with grapes in his mouth, drawn away from the movie trailer for what could possibly be Hollywood’s gazillionth superhero film in the past ten years –  _ Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur _ . 

“Annie’s texting me… she’s cute.” Mako snickers, leaning his head into Jem’s shoulder. He hovers his thumbs over his touchscreen keyboard, wanting to reply and yet unsure how to despite the popcorn lovefeeling in his chest, the phantom scent of cheap beer and stale sweat, Annie’s Tuesday night drunkenness momentarily his own.

“It’s a good thing I’m not jealous or anything,” Jem remarks. He raises a grape to Mako’s mouth, smiles as the other’s teeth pierce its thin green skin. “‘ _ Annie’s cute. KC’s cute. That thirteen year old boy who bagged our groceries was cute– _ ’”

“Oh my God, you’re making me sound like a pedophile–”

“I thought you’d prefer the term chickenhawk, but okay.”

Mako brings a hand up and then viciously down against the back of Jem’s head, mercilessly shoving and kicking the man amidst his snuffly, Mickey Mousian, dog whistle-inspired, Mary-Hart-epileptic-seizure-inducing laughter. Mako loses track of the conversation and of Annie in the middle of all this – Jem’s sarcasm, not quite as lethal as his yet still fatal by its own right; Steve Harvey’s glorified minstrel show on the tube; Kory running down the stairs and finally tripping and stubbing her toe as Mako prophesized for years that she would; refilling Stevie’s water; turning on the outside light so that he can go smoke – but he is brought hurtling right back to both when he walks into work the next morning and finds Annie withering like an old, dehydrated flower at her desk, wearing a faded gray T-shirt with a marijuana leaf on it.

“Hi, Mako,” she greets him in a stage whisper, motioning for him to close their office door against Jerri’s blaringly loud KC and the Sunshine Band and then, when he does and the resulting  _ thock _ ing noise resounds throughout the room, wincing with her entire body. Her shirt has a tiny hole in the collar; she fiddles with it idly, a self-stimulating action. 

“Are you okay?” Mako half-murmurs in reply. As soon as this question has passed into and disappeared in the air, three more are materializing in its place. “Are you sick? Why didn’t you stay home? You know you could have stayed home, right?”

“No, no, just a hangover.” Annie grins, and the act of doing so seems to cause her physical pain, a vein popping oh so cutely out on her forehead, the flattened crescent of her mouth severe rather than gentle or sweet. “I’m a professional. I can handle this.” 

“Dude,  _ fuck _ professionalism. Professionalism can eat shit and die. It’s so, like… modern, inhuman, eugh.” Mako puts his messenger bag down by his desk. “I should do something with that.  _ Yeah _ . Maybe I’ll write an article about it.”

“‘ _ Fuck professionalism _ ’?” Annie asks. “How do you think Priya will feel about that?”

“Holy shit, she’ll love it. She’ll be all over it. She’ll ask me to marry her and have her kids, Zeus and Dionysus-style.”

“You’re right.”

“Go home, hon.” Mako makes his face a mask of gentleness and firm resolve, of both deep-seated affection and domineering authority. “You look like death warmed over. You look like God took a shit on your face. You look like the prettiest piece of roadkill there ever was. You look like–”

“Wow, okay, mean!” Despite this exclamation, Annie is giggling, head thrown all the way back and hands clasped self-consciously over her face. Eight years into their relationship and Mako still feels like he’s going to spew sweet vomit when she laughs like this, like they’re super stinking cute teenagers rather than the slightly problematic duo of superior and subordinate. Why else would he insist on her fetching his coffee under absolutely no circumstances and ask her to act as his assistant only insofar as her job strictly requires her to? Why else would their after-work coffee dates verge on intimate, their knowledge of each other so thorough?

Annie goes home with semi-strict instructions to remain in bed and drink plenty of Gatorade. Mako passes the first several hours of the workday alone – holed up hermit-like in his office with the door barricaded against Jerri’s tunes, Kelsey’s general assholery, Jackson’s perpetual leering, and Priya’s clearly undiagnosed or otherwise untreated alcoholism. Then, with the permission and oversight of no one but himself, he takes an extra-long lunch break to eat Whole Foods sushi with the second half of  _ KC and Godfrey on 97.9 KLOY _ : the radio royalty husband-and-wife dyad that constituted Mako’s very first friends in New Orleans, back when he was alone and his only friend on the North American continent was the six year-old one he’d brought with him.

“Why couldn’t KC join us again?”

“She’s shopping for clothes with the little man,” Godfrey replies, drizzling spicy orange sauce in thin, winding stripes over his sushi rolls. Godfrey – the most beautiful man Mako has ever seen in his life, six feet and four inches of exquisite Taiwanese-American masculinity laid over soft inner layers of bone-melting sweetness and gut-busting humor – is a vision on this slightly breezy October afternoon, wearing his midnight-colored button-down open across his chest and his hair freshly cut, shaved chicly close on each side of his head. “Kai needs new shoes already. We think he’s going through a growth spurt.”

“Watch out, he’ll turn gigantic like you before you can even blink,” Mako quips. Godfrey sips Fuji water from his plastic bottle and projectile spits it in Mako’s direction, ever the little boy.

Together, they sit in the rectangle of shadow cast by Whole Foods, yards away from the hot, yellow October sunlight that would cook them in their floral baseball caps and politically incorrect faux-moccasins were they directly exposed to it. They share the boring minutiae of each other’s lives – Mako half-heartedly apologizing for rejecting Godfrey’s offer for dinner on his birthday and showing off his new watch with its tiny solar panels and solid silver bezel, Godfrey walking Mako through the updates made to his special Instagram dedicated solely to his son (snapshots of KC plaiting Kai’s hair in neat cornrows, of Mako giving the boy a piggyback ride at his sixth birthday party last weekend) and informing him of KC’s latest obsession (“It’s Brad Pitt movies,” Godfrey says, oozing derision. “I don’t give a fuck how hot he is –  _ Legends of the Fall _ is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.”). Halfway through his sushi tray – feeling the unpleasant inner bloatedness that always comes at around this point in every meal – Mako declares after not much deliberation, “I think I’m a little bit in love with my editorial assistant.”

Godfrey stretches his lips unsmiling back over his teeth, eyes big, brows flung up toward his forehead and straining to become one with his hairline. “Yikes!”

“What do you mean, ‘yikes’?”

“I mean, you’re taken! Happily, as far as I know.” Godfrey points his chopsticks at Mako in most accusatory fashion. “I mean, say hello to your new sexual harassment suit, chicken.”

“I don’t want to date her, oh my God!” Mako resists the urge to throw something at Godfrey, instead settling for simply stretching his eyes at him and replying, “I’m a little bit in love with you, for fuck’s sake. Are you going to sue me? Are we going to up and leave Jem and KC and start dating?”

Godfrey gives him a yielding shrug and says, stuffing a California roll into the pocket of his right cheek, “I am almost flawless.”

Mako releases a monstrous, screaming belch. He and Godfrey stare at each other, talking with their eyebrows, trying not to laugh. Mako steals Godfrey’s water bottle. Amidst his friend’s affected eye-rolling and fake sobbing noises, he swallows two mouthfuls of filtered  _ agua _ , then, coming up for air, says, “She drunk-texted me last night.”

Without words, Godfrey makes the same face he did when he said, “Yikes!” in the minutes prior.

“Not like that,” Mako deflects. “She was at a Hornets game.”

“That explains so much.”

“It was fine, it– it wasn’t sexy at all. She was talking about how badly she wanted to be a Black woman–”

“Honestly?” Godfrey interjects. “Same.”

“–and then she told me she loved me–”

Godfrey makes a show of gasping and slapping a hand over his mouth in overly exaggerated shock. Mako, used to this kind of bullshit (in fact, the inventor of this kind of bullshit), ignores him.

“–before immediately getting embarrassed and taking it back.” He smears his dragon roll in wasabi. “It was so cute.”

“Get your biggest spoons ready, bitches,” Godfrey pronounces, flourishing his chopsticks in the air. “We’re digging ourselves a hole!”

“She’s just like…” Mako pauses to raise his eyes in thought, watching without truly seeing the fat, common little brown birds that gather and flit around Whole Foods like moths about the yellow streetlights that line the roads. “I don’t want to call her magical because I feel like that’s so manic pixie dream girl and disrespectful to her personhood–”

In his voice that subtly recalls that of his African-American wife, Godfrey coos, “ _ Oooh _ , go ‘head with your gender studies bent, my man.”

“–but that’s the only word I can come up with. She drinks coffee from mason jars and puts miniature fairy doors on trees in Audubon Park. She writes semi-Catholic poetry and wears sunflowers and like, little foxes on her clothes. She’s the most delightful person I’ve ever met, and I have a five-foot-tall human  _ that I made _ living in my house.”

“Well…” Godfrey reaches to take his water back from Mako’s side of the bench they’re sharing, letting his arm cross over the other’s lap with none of the hypermasculine anxiety Mako would normally expect from someone as vehemently heterosexual as him. “I would not tell her any of this,” he says after indulging himself in a contemplative sip. “Are you in charge of her paycheck?”

“Kind of?” Mako scrunches up his nose, confused in the way one can only be about something they’ve never really thought about before. “I mean, I can vouch for her excellent performance and work ethic and all that bullshit to the editor in chief, which could feasibly result in a raise or a bonus, but no, I don’t actually have direct control over how much she gets paid.”

“Damn.” Godfrey’s elbow knocks inadvertently against Mako’s and what’s supposed to be a minuscule blotch of wasabi on the latter’s dragon roll turns into a big, fat one. “Maybe you could get her a nice mug that says, like… ‘ _ I like you a lot but also don’t sue my ass off. _ ’”

“I think you’re making a mountain out of a molehill.” Mako bites into his thickly wasabied sushi and, tucking with his tongue the bits of rice, tempura, avocado, and eel into his left cheek, instantly feels his sinuses come hotly, wetly open. He makes his voice a high, warbling croon. “ _ Oh, oh Godfrey, I have tender and mostly but not completely platonic feelings towards you _ –”

“Woah, damn, hold on–”

“ _ Please kiss me with tongue now! _ ” Mako allows his face, previously lit up with exaggerated, lovesick affection, to go impassive and unimpressed. “Would I ever say that to you and mean it?”

Godfrey squints at him. “Maybe?”

Mako deadpans harder. “No.”

“You never told me you had  _ feelings _ for me, Mako.” The way Godfrey says “feelings” – the word audibly italicized and trellised with pretty vines sprouting rosebuds – makes Mako want to vomit, keel over and expel his lunch and the other assorted contents of his abdominal cavity onto the New Orleans concrete.

Instead, he just gives his friend a positively incredulous look and says, “I would have thought KC and I making all kinds of obscene comments about your ass, chest, and hands at every available opportunity would have tipped you off.”

“I thought you were just providing KC with moral support!”

“You thought me telling your wife I’d fuck the shit out of you was moral support?” As if he’s in a cartoon, Mako’s jaw nearly hits the ground –  _ thunk! _ sound and everything. “Also, let’s back up for a second, alright? I don’t have  _ feelings  _ for you–”

“My heart literally just cracked up into tiny pieces. Oh, man.” A breathtaking smile splits Godfrey’s face in two, laughter spilling out of it, his dimples on display. “All I’ve ever wanted in life is for a gay friend to be in love with me.”

“I’m not in love with you!”

“I know! Can’t you see me literally crying over here?!”

“It’s just– I care about people. Like, a lot. Like, way too fucking much and I don’t ever know how to deal with it.” Mako, embarrassed, cuts his gaze sideways and shoves a stray piece of tempura into his mouth. “It’s my bisexual curse – falling in love with every single person in my life.”

Godfrey coughs. “Are you in love with your mom?”

Mako glares at him. “Come on.”

Being that shame is an emotion he is simply incapable of experiencing, Godfrey just smiles, pops a thin sheet of ginger root between his lips, and says, “I’m touched, dude, I really am. I love you, too.”

“Yeah, yeah, you hetero scum.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.” Godfrey munches on his sixth California roll in the past five minutes. “You know, when I was a lawyer like two-hundred years ago, I started sleeping with another lawyer at my firm. Piper – that was her name. She was really cute. I mean, really cute. She did that thing chicks do with their eyeliner, where they make it go  _ fwhoop! _ ” He motions at the corner of his eye with his pinkie finger, flicking the digit upward. “And hers were like, perfect. Like every single time, every day, her eye makeup was just,  _ ugh _ – heartstopping. Is it weird that I was so into that?”

“You sound like you’re still so into that,” Mako remarks around the lip of Godfrey’s Fiji.

“I am, man. I swear to god, every woman that does that is like, the Mona Lisa as far as I’m concerned. Don’t tell her I said this, but I never would have started dating Kace if her eyeliner wasn’t on point when we met.”

Mako emits a loud, ugly snorting noise. “That’s so fucked up but completely understandable.”

“Anyway. I started sleeping with Piper, and at first things were great, you know? We both had an understanding that the sex was just sex and our work relationship was separate from all that. It’s not like we ran in the same circles or anything. Piper was like, a buttoned-down Tulane chick and her father was some fat cat, rich Jew. She shopped at the fucking Riverwalk, for God’s sake. She didn’t know who Fiona Apple was.”

“Oh, yeah. Nothing like you.”

“Right? But then things got weird. We started having sex  _ at _ work, and when you do that, separating your work relationship from your sexual relationship just becomes impossible. And she was dating some guy on the side – some, like, aspiring economic theorist she lived in the same dorm with back at Tulane–”

“That sequence of words literally just made me vomit in my mouth a little,” Mako interjects.

“Oh, my God, I’m sayin’. But like, listen!” Godfrey raises both hands in front of him, sushi in its little blue tray balanced on his thighs just before his knees. “We’d fuck, right? And it was great, we had that thing that KC is always fucking talking about–”

“ _ Sexual chemistry _ ,” they say in unison.

“We were bouncing off the goddamn walls, man. But then she tells me one time after we finish that her guy doesn’t fuck her like I do. That she wishes he was more like me. So she’s catching feelings for me or whatever, and it’s like, obvious. Everyone at the firm can tell something’s up. Meanwhile me and my paralegal are also vibing super hard–”

“Are you talking about the one with the normal name but the really fucked up spelling?” Mako asks. “ _ D-Y-A-N-A? _ ”

“No, it was  _ D-H-Y-A-N-N-A _ . Yes, I’m talking about her.” Godfrey pauses to take a bite out of his sushi, then keeps talking even with the wad of raw food being chewed and rolled around in his mouth. “Me and Dhyanna – it’s bad, okay, it’s really bad, because we’d always flirted. From the time I hired her, I flirted with her. I’m a dick, okay? But after me and Piper start fucking, the flirting gets more intense? And I don’t know who’s the one that escalated it? It was probably me, knowing myself. So now Piper is jealous, and I’m trying to get in my paralegal’s skirt, and the senior partners are catching wind of all this stupid  _ Jersey Shore _ bullshit, and you know what the moral of the story is, Mako? Don’t get involved with the people you work with. It makes things so awful and awkward that you have to quit your job and move on to a completely unrelated career in radio.”

Mako raises his thumb, index, and middle finger. “Three things.”

Godfrey nods. “Yes.”

“One: you didn’t stop practicing law because you fucked your coworker. You stopped practicing law because it was sucking your soul out of your asshole with a bendy straw.”

“That is the most beautiful mental image I’ve been given in months,” Godfrey says, clasping his hands together in mock-prayer. “Thank you for that.”

“Two.” Mako puts his face close to Godfrey’s ear, then yells, “I’m not going to fuck my assistant!” Amidst Godfrey’s distressed jerking and the wide-eyed stares they’re getting from random passersby, Mako grabs both of Godfrey’s hands to keep him from covering his ears and continues to speak at a moderately high volume. “I have a partner who I love and a family that I care too much about to destroy just because I think Annie is charming!”

“Okay, man, goddamn!” Managing to wrestle his hands free, Godfrey shoves Mako away from him, sending his sushi tray careening toward the gray and grit of the ground, which it hits with a plastic clatter. Mako gives the wasted food a mournful look and tells himself he wasn’t going to finish it anyway.

“Three.” He says this calmly, quietly, all of his inner Zen bullshit having returned to him with the spoiling of his meal. “I think you’re projecting. That’s why you’re making such a big deal out of all this. I think you’re just a big fat slut.”

Grinning, Godfrey snatches a hand out to grab Mako’s left wrist, his voice high-pitched and pornographic when he cries, “Oooh, daddy, slap me here and say that!”

Mako does not flush or blanch; he just lets his head fall back over his shoulders and hollers into the heavy Crescent City air, “Why am I your friend!”

“Because you couldn’t find anyone better in this cesspool city,” Godfrey replies, telling the truth, meaning it. When, approximately five minutes later, he and Mako part ways to return to work (or, in Godfrey’s case, to catch what few winks he can before going on the air in an hour and a half), they share an embrace that lasts for slightly too long and agree to give their respective families each other’s love.

Back in his office at the stroke of 2:00 PM, Mako taps out a quick email to Annie on his work account.

#    
  


**FROM:** _Mako Gehringer <mgehringer@endymionnola.com>  
_ **TO:** _Anna Bailey <abailey@endymionnola.com>  
_ **SUBJECT:** _Omaha_

fun fact: there’s a beach town in new zealand named omaha. it means “place of pleasure” in maori. there’s an endangered bird called the tuturuatu that lives there. just thought you’d like to know.

(ps: feel better! i’ll see you tomorrow! ☺)

mako gehringer  
endymion: features editor  
(504) 281-8449

#    
  


When he gets in his car to drive home three hours later, keying on the engine and being greeted immediately by Godfrey and KC on the radio – “Good afternoon, New Orleans,” comes Godfrey’s voice, smooth as silk. “It’s time for the five o’clock traffic jam.” – his phone chimes and vibrates against his left butt cheek, asking for his attention. Giving in to the urge to check the notification, Mako finds a short and sweet reply to his missive and then – sitting alone in the small, hot place that is the front seat – smiles.

#    
  


**FROM:** _Anna Bailey <abailey@endymionnola.com>   
_**TO:** _Mako Gehringer <mgehringer@endymionnola.com>  
_ **SUBJECT:** _Re: Omaha_

Omaha, Nebraska was named for the Omaha Native Americans; their name means “dwellers on the bluff.” Omaha is the birthplace of the bobby pin, the Reuben sandwich, cake mix, Raisin Bran, the ski lift, and the "Top 40" radio format, among other things.

(PS: I took a nap like you asked and I already feel so much better. Thank you!)

Annie Bailey  
Editorial Assistant | Features  
(402) 699-1278

#    
  
  



	5. 05

#  _ 5 _

Mako arrives home at 5:24 PM on a Thursday, devoid of all his keys save the ones to the gate.

“Live long and prosper, dude,” says his Uber driver – an olive-skinned teenager with whom Mako just spent the past thirteen minutes discussing the merits of the original run of  _ Star Trek _ versus the merits of  _ The Next Generation _ . 

Mako pauses before letting the back door of the Subaru swing shut. “You too, man,” he says, and he’s a little shocked, even after eight years of living here, at how New Orleanian he feels uttering it.

Then it is sitting within the confines of the courtyard adjacent to the house for twenty minutes, waiting for someone to remember his existence.

Nobody, as one might have guessed, is home. How Mako came to be abandoned is a bit of a long story. Last week Mum’s car started making these awful stuttering noises – something like a mechanical horse suffering pneumonia in the last days of its life, neighing feebly every time a crazy human attempted to take the reins and ride it to the grocery store. Consequently, she’s been using the Jetta to run her surprisingly many, considering her seventy-eight years, errands to the bookstore and the farmer’s market and God knows what other strange pockets of New Orleans since last Wednesday. Kory has ballet lessons every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon from 3:30 to 5:00 after school, which is likely the direct reason for the Jetta’s – and Mum’s – absence on this particular afternoon. Jem, on the other hand, teaches his intermediate photography class for adolescents and young adults at NOCCA tonight, so he’s probably doing his pre-work snacking at the Whole Foods on Broad Street and pointedly ignoring his phone while he gets into his so-called teaching zone, whatever that means. He also dropped his house keys into the crevice beneath his car seat last week, necessitating Mako’s handing off his own keys until a trip to Home Depot is made. Thus, Mako is locked out and alone.

Reaching into the deep pocket of his wine-colored corduroys for his vape pen, having quit cigarettes well over a year ago, Mako peers up through the transom above the front door to spy Stevie perched at the top of the stairs inside the house, looking absolutely tranquil in her safe, indoor existence. He is struck with fantastic envy – envy that has him feeling around in his messenger bag for his smartphone, girding his loins, and dialing the home number in the hopes that Kory might, perhaps, already be inside the house despite all evidence to the contrary. He is received by six rings and the voicemail message:  _ Heeey, you’ve reached Mako – and Kora! – and Jeremiah. This is Mako speaking. Jem won’t record this message with me because he thinks it’s too gay – you did say that, too, stop lying – anyway leave a messageathebeep, thankyoubye! Beeeep _ .

Dejected but not totally disheartened, he moves on to Mum’s cell. Gets voicemail again:  _ You’ve reached Rui Ngata. I’m not available at the moment, but if you leave a message I’ll get back to you soon. Thank you. Beeeep _ .

As a last resort, Mako goes to the premiere number on his speed dial. A third voicemail message is listened to, then hung up on:  _ Hey, this is Jeremiah. You could leave me a message, or you could just have a wonderful day. Beeeep _ .

Mako sighs, then opens his iMessage thread with Jem.

#    
  


**Today** 5:29 PM

**mako gehringer  
** hey i know you’re probably having a hell of a time eating that sweet sweet cream of mushroom but i’m STUCK OUTSIDE and i’d really appreciate it fi you answered your goddamn phone

also i looooove you don’t forget <3

#    
  


Five minutes pass without reply from Jem. Mako decides he is feeling tired.

Cross-legged in the cushioned wooden lawn chair placed closest to the front door, he tunes in and out of the cornucopia of neighborhood sounds surrounding him: the geriatric population out for its late afternoon walk, murmuring in cottony, moth-winged voices about Booga (Booga?) and the latest results of her knee replacement surgery; the way the bugs are attempting to kill themselves against streetlights, the background  _ pi-thunk _ ing noise of their bodies being thrown against the pale yellow and blue electric coronas suspended above; small squirrelly animals scurrying and occasionally even falling out of trees and the accompanying rustling of leaves; the almost aquatic drone of the tires of the cars passing by on the street with their brights on for no apparent reason; the scuttling of cockroaches around the decimated half-orange Mako made a point to ignore on his way inside the gate; the middle-aged woman across the street yelling at the neighborhood teenagers heckling her from their bicycles, screeching at the top of her lungs, “Y’all can’t touch my pussy! No, you can’t!”; the organic throbbing of the Bywater all around, the way the neighborhood and the entirety of the city itself seems to have a pulse when the light is right and all the two-leggeds are outside; the tap of Mako’s own fingers against the light wooden arm of his chair, beating out a Talking Heads naïve melody.

His nicotine tank is nearly depleted when at the far right corner of his vision, he notices the man reclined in the chair beside him: shirtless, built like a brick shithouse, and haloed with thick curls the color of the deep green sea. Across his lap is a brass trident adorned with split strings of Mardi Gras beads and encrusted with dried mud in the dips between each pointed prong. Mako watches the man with squinted, suspicious eyes – watches him gaze idly up into the strawberry lemonade mid-October heavens, completely encased within the world of his own singular perspective – until it abruptly occurs to him that he’s sharing the courtyard with the Tchoupitoulas Poseidon, sans his great pet alligator.

The 1984 World Fair in New Orleans was a congregation of divine life the likes of which the world hadn’t seen since before the time of Constantine, when Christian monotheism made its first fateful play for world domination. The only still-standing remnant of this historic theophany – one graced by the presences of Krishna, Gaia, and countless nymphs of myth – is the massive likeness of Poseidon and a fiberglass alligator on the corner of Tchoupitoulas and Henderson, yards away from the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center and watchful over the Central Business District of the Crescent City, where our story takes place. The irony in all this, one could surmise, is that Poseidon will ultimately be the one responsible for the demise of New Orleans, will watch smiley-faced and manic as the city eventually succumbs to the sea like a modern-day Ys before the end of the twenty-first century. It’s sad, but New Orleans will laugh on ‘till its dying breath, no doubt. It’s never quite learned how to do anything else.

Mako shares space with this Poseidon for quiet minutes that seem to stretch on for lifetimes. He sucks on his vape pen until it beeps abortively at him, flashing its red light and crying out  _ no more! _ He indulges in some cloudgazing himself, unusually content for now to simply exist in his eyes and wait. At the zenith of his comfort level, Poseidon inclines his heavy oceanic head to the left and utters, “You’re gonna lose it all, my dude.”

The deity has a Southern California surfer’s drawl; the odd, quasi-Irish brogue of white New Orleanians; and the booming intonation of all hypothetical cosmic beings – all at once, all in equal amounts.

Mako turns to level him with a questioning look. “What are you talking about?” 

Poseidon grins with green, seaweedy teeth. “You’re gonna lose it, man.”

Mako’s cell rings, and he is yanked right out of the moment.

“Hello?” he answers, entirely alone in the courtyard.

“Hey,” comes Mum’s slightly tinny voice over the phone. “I’m stuck in five o’clock traffic and these assholes! On I-10! Are driving like driving like bogans! Are you home?”

“Hell yeah, I’ve been sitting by the house for twenty minutes.”

“Okay. Okay, I’m on my way. Did you call Jem?”

“He didn’t answer.”

“Of course he didn’t. I’m on my way! I’m hanging up now.”

And then she does hang up. Mako is alone and waiting again. When she finally gets home – toting her reusable grocery bag full of expensive fruits and vegetables (something yellow and spiky called a horned melon? a small collection of dragon fruits?) with Kory skipping along behind her in her ballet tights and with her hair a collapsing top knot on her head – he finds himself so overcome with relief and love that he takes both women into his arms and plants kisses in the dirt of their foreheads and temples, squeezing them tight enough to deprive them of their capacities to breathe when they complain at him – “What the hell, Mako, let me unlock the door first,” and, “Daddy, stop it, I’m all sweaty and gross!” 

“I’m just,” he says, feigning but not really feigning the breathless amazement that comes with the immensity of his affection. “So happy to see you!”

They make dragon fruit smoothies and plans to grill vegetables for dinner. Jem texts Mako back a useless hour and a half later.

#    
  


**Today** 7:09 PM

**jeremiah tui  
** Sorry I was in my teaching zone. Did you get into the house? (I assume you did because the frantic texting ended right there haha)

I love you too, wow! I accidentally showed my class that super awk picture of you on my desktop and legiterally turned three shades redder, my students can attest

#    
  


Mako has come to believe that New Orleans is the dual-edged nexus of water and connections, missed or otherwise. Poseidon and his sometimes absent scaly green companion. Its overflowing everything, its surplus of moisture, its trash crawling up and down the street with the rain and its cacophony of voices that come from every doorway- and sewer-shaped orifice – all of it, mixed up together, has struck him from the very beginning as magical with a suicidal leaning. Fairyland missing several doses of Prozac. He loves New Orleans as he loves Jem, as loves Kory, as he loved the Australian drug addict Cassidy from Mid-City and as he loved the mother of his child. The love fills his heart until it feels liable to burst. It is so wild, and so much.

Two days later, it is 9:16 AM on a Saturday and the United States Postal Service truck is crawling from 702 Louisa to 706 Louisa, gently sloshing fresh rainwater along the banks of the eczematous street. Mako is watching from the window perpendicular to the Mississippi in the darkish gray living room (it isn’t always gray; most of the time it’s many colors, some of the time it’s none at all, but this morning it’s gray with blue undertones and little pops of scarlet and lemon yellow in the neighborhood of the bookshelf) as the ebony mailwoman disappears into the back of her truck, emerges with an armful of mail, and makes a considerably brisk journey from her truck to the mailbox on the edge of the property in a dark blue rain jacket. Through some fantastic feat of magic, she manages to get all the junk in the crook of her arm into the cramped metal compartment, and no sooner than she’s raised the mailbox door shut is she rushing off back through the torrent from the sky and the shallow sea at the edge of the street, back in the direction of her safe, dry truck.

Mako sips slowly at his spicy chai and milk, travels his gaze from the window to Stevie poised attentively at the threshold between the living room and the dining area. Sweeping her furry tortoiseshell head in a smooth, slow arc back and forth in the air – her long gone eyes lazy, her whiskers and the small twitching pink bud of her nose doing all the work – she scans her milieu for lengthy moments until she seems to sense her beloved two-legged staring at her, upon which she goes stock-still, ears reaching for the sky.

“Shall we check the mail?” Mako asks, perfectly confident that the cat can both see and understand him. 

Stevie makes a soft huffling noise and turns to pad into the kitchen, where she’d been enjoying her IAMS breakfast just minutes earlier. “You do what you want,” she purrs in reply. “I have a meal to continue.”

Mako scoffs. “Appreciate the support.” One more sip, then the old Victoria U mug is on the coffee table and Mako’s hand is on the doorknob.

Feeling daring and idiotic, he decides to forgo the colorful windbreaker on the brass hook by the door and instead ventures in only his three-dollar floral Target flip-flops, Jem’s old Wellington Bowling Club T-shirt, and a pair of women’s yoga pants (also from Target) out into the muggy downpour. Out from below the awning above the front door he darts – scampering wetly across the elevated terrace, down the red brick steps, through the gate, and out onto the sidewalk, where the sky is having an absolute ball out of pouring all its woes. He makes quick work of emptying his mailbox into his arms, doesn’t spare so much as a glance at return addresses, then dashes back for his still-open front door, soaking himself once, twice, even thrice over in the trip to and fro.

Back inside, Mako kicks the door shut with enough force to send a minor tremor throughout the front end of the house, breathing hard through the intoxicating, almost dizzying rush of adrenaline within him and holding his moderately drenched mail away from his majorly drenched body. The delicate sound of a feline yawn prefaces Stevie’s reentry into the living room; licking her chops, she hesitates to flick her ears in the direction of her dripping housemate, inclining her head this way as if to say, “Oh my God. What a mess you make!” 

Mako simply gives the kitty a warm, wet smile. Leaves the mail on the coffee table with a soft  _ splat _ .

After toweling off in the upstairs bathroom and changing into another of Jem’s holey T-shirts and a pair of sweatpants – an act during which he is intercepted several times by Jem himself, insistently calling from within his burrow beneath the covers, “Come get back in bed, it’s Saturday,” and then, when he is roundly ignored, slipping out of bed to grab Mako by the waistband and convince him, albeit unsuccessfully, with gross morning breath kisses – Mako refills his Class of ‘08 mug and sits down to review his mail. The pile consists of: a shrink-wrapped issue of Rolling Stone magazine (that gives Mako reason to suck his teeth in irritation; he’s been trying to get out of his entirely unpaid and uncalled for subscription for over a year now); a New Orleans Daily News newsletter from the New Orleans Advocate; a takeout menu for Five Happiness on South Carrollton; a letter from Loren and Blaise Peltier; a letter from Tatum Wharerahi; unsolicited sweepstakes tickets from Salesian Missions in New Rochelle, New York; his cable/Internet/telephone bill from Cox Communications; and a small yellow package from HENGSONG, Inc. in Hong Kong. Rolling Stone goes on the very edge of the coffee table (Mako will put it in the downstairs bathroom later for the toilet time perusal of future houseguests); the sweepstakes tickets and the takeout menu go on the floor (they, on the other hand, are destined for the trash); the bill, the package, and the newsletter stay on the coffee table proper for Mako’s forthcoming but not immediate attention, and the two letters remain in Mako’s hands.

The letter from Tatum has a stamp featuring a kiwi bird wearing sunglasses. Beside Mako’s name in the recipient address – right after the final ‘r’ in ‘Gehringer’ – is stylized doodle of a face Mako is guessing is his own, given its beardiness and iconographically disgruntled expression along with its speech bubble utterance of, “Skux life, bro”: his old university catchphrase. He absolutely butchers opening the envelope, ends up dragging his thumb crudely between the bit of flap he’s managed to peel away and the front side of the envelope, leaving the parcel gaping open like a shark’s mouth, ragged paper teeth and all. He still plans on keeping it, though, if for no other reason than that he wants to preserve his portrait.

Inside the half-ruined envelope, he finds a photograph of himself and Tatum in the beach grass on Lyall Bay, clad in intensely flattering body-hugging wetsuits and in their earliest of twenties. The light is that of a slightly overcast midday, coloring the world in familiar gray-blue hues. Tatum, nearly a whole head shorter than Mako, has her right hip and knee cocked upward and outward, respectively, her left arm wrapped with a casual sort of loving propriety around Mako’s hips and waist. Mako, for his part, drapes his own arm about Tatum’s moisture-speckled, neoprene-covered shoulders and rests his stubbled chin atop her crown, lower mandible happily buried in her saltwatery black hair. Upon flipping the photo over to briefly examine the backside, Mako finds the following scrawled in Tatum’s unmistakably pretty, near-indecipherable handwriting: ‘MAKO & TATE, June 2007’. 

In addition to the photograph, the envelope also contains a handwritten note on vibrant cerulean stationery. It takes Mako approximately three and a half minutes to get through it.

_ Dearest Mako, Everlasting Friend and King of My Heart (that’s your title, do you like it?) – _

_ I found this while cleaning out my office this afternoon and thought you might like to have it. I’d almost forgotten the picture even existed. If I’m remembering correctly, Jem was the photographer for this one. Does he still have all those photos I took of you guys that day? If so, please scan them and shoot me an email. I’m doing a Teasippers retrospective and I’d love to use them. _

_ Also WTF duder, how are you? How is your life? How is your heart? You’ve been ridiculously present in my thoughts lately. I know it’s been years since you flew the coop, but I still feel you like you’re right around the corner. Last night I had a dream that you and I ate cupcakes in my high school bed, except we were our current ancient age of thirty-eight, and you kept talking about Kora like she was our daughter. “Our Kora,” you kept saying, and then you’d laugh like it was some inside joke. Is that a weird thing to divulge to you? Will it make Jem jealous? If it will, you have to tell him immediately. It will always be my mission in life to make that man frown. _

_ Maybe pick up the phone every now and then? I miss the sound of your voice!! Stephani sends her love, by the way. I also send my love. Love you. I’m kissing this before I send it. _

_ Nui o te aroha,  
_ _ Tate _

Mako brings the stationery up to his face to sniff it; to enjoy its light, jasminey scent; and to press his lips briefly to it, as if Tatum might magically feel his kiss as though he’d left it on her skin instead of her note.

He then moves on to the Peltiers’ letter, addressed to him in handwriting that couldn’t be more different than Tatum’s – straight, sharply-edged, nearly verging on severe, most definitely Blaise’s. Giving this envelope the same rough, clumsy treatment he afforded the other one, Mako finds inside a bright red greeting card featuring a Jack Russell terrier rendered cartoonishly in black and white, thinking “Y O U” in a large, heart-shaped thought bubble. Inscribed within is a message comical in its brevity as well as its deceptively narrow focus:

_ We miss you, you old slutty, slutty dog. _

_ – Loren + Blaise (and baby Jeannie) _

Feeling his fingertips go warm, Mako lets escape from his chest, throat, and lips a loud, intensely pleased honk of a laugh. Beside him on the sofa, Stevie sneezes and curls her legs up beneath her body until she resembles a furry tortoiseshell bread loaf with a cat’s delicate head. Mum emerges from her room into the kitchen, where she immediately switches on the coffee maker and begins to speak at length – to Mako, to the room, to the entirety of the house, no one can be quite sure. Jem and Kory sleep until twelve, and the watery day marches on.

Sunday morning, as it so often does, witnesses an inversion of the conditions of Saturday’s earliest sunlight hours. Rather than rising in a manic high before the stroke of 10:00 AM, Mako is still swaddled, baby-like, in his sheets well past 11:00, having experienced in the intervening hours between yesterday’s fantastic! magical! wondrously happy wet morning! and today’s almost perfectly boring seventy-degree Fahrenheit pre-noon a semi-sharp downturn in his spirits, a progression of his rapid-cycling condition into the middle-depressive area of his mood’s typical spectrum. It’s almost mystical, almost climatological, this steady shifting between  _ hyperokay _ and  _ eh, maybe not so great _ and  _ superfluously, vegetatively amazing _ and  _ Night of the Living Dead sort of ghastly _ .

Jem crawls back into bed with all his day clothes on at around 11:30, scooting forward hips-first until his nose is mere inches from Mako’s. He then proceeds to talk aimlessly until Mako floats blearily into consciousness, tuning in right about here:

“… so I said ‘Kory, it doesn’t really matter unless you’re trying to impress someone,’ and then she got this odd look on her face and like, she can’t really blush because she’s got your good, beautiful brown skin – meanwhile I’m as perfectly Māori as you and I’m what? Pasty as all get out – but yeah, if she could have blushed, she’d have been a beet, mate. So what I’m saying is, we need to go to the grocery store today, not only because we need groceries, but also so we can discover who Kory’s super-secret Rouses crush is and tease her mercilessly about it until the day she gets married. I don’t know about you, but I think it’s great rehearsal dinner material. Are we those type of parents? Would you like to be that type of parent? Personally, I’m open to trying things out-”

“Good morning. I love you. Now please go suffocate yourself with a pillow.”

Jem grins – so infuriating – into Mako’s squinting, sleepy face. “There he is,” he coos, reaching beneath the covers and stubbornly worming his arm into Mako’s blanket cocoon until he can grasp the other’s hip and give it an affectionate squeeze. “You always look so beautiful when you’re just waking up.”

Mako leans in to kiss Jem, but changes his mind halfway into it and instead grabs his pillow and tries to shove it all the way into his partner’s mouth. This turns into a full-blown wrestling match that ends with him pinned to the bed – disadvantaged by his drowsiness and just plain weaker than Jem – with Jem looming above him, palms wrapped around his wrists and knees pressing uncomfortably, almost painfully into his inner thighs.

“So, I don’t know how much of my speech you caught,” he says, continuing as though he’s not totally out of breath and Mako didn’t attempt murder or something like it mere moments ago. “But the gist was that we need to go to the grocery store, and I’d rather get it over with sooner than later because Sundays in Rouses…” He trails off with a toothy grimace and a guttural, almost comic noise of discontent.

“… you’re hurting me,” Mako replies with his eyes closed.

Jem wastes no time releasing Mako’s wrists and moving to kneel between his thighs rather than upon them. Just to keep them touching, though, he puts his hand on Mako’s lower abdomen through the covers, idly rubs his thumb along the left-side ridge of his Adonis belt.

“ _ Grocery store _ ,” he says, the words soft and elongated as if they were being delivered to a small child.

“I hear you,” Mako yawns, even as his eyes remain closed and he turns his face halfway into the sheets.

Kory appears in the doorway at that moment, wearing her very favorite sundress (the one with the chiffon skirt and the faux-silk bow in the back – a little too much for grocery shopping). “Is he up yet!” she asks.

“ _ I hear you! _ ” Mako bellows back, and only when Jem and Kora roll all over him where he lies and Mum begins to loudly bitch from downstairs about all the screaming does he finally, finally assume fully awake status and wander into the bathroom to figure out what to do with his teeth, face, and beard in mostly that order.

Today, waking up for Mako looks like this:

1.) Standing in front of the mirror slowly picking blanket lint out of his beard with his fingernails until Jem pokes his head in the room and starts to say, “I don’t mean to rush you, but–”

1a.) Releasing a long, primal scream until Jem goes away and Mum puts her head at the bottom of the stairs to yell, “Mako, are you dying?!”

1b.) Saying, at an entirely personal volume, “I don’t really know.”

2.) Brushing his teeth; wondering whether he needs to call the dentist when he spits a yellowish-pink.

3.) Trimming his now lintless beard into a more aesthetically pleasing, jaw-hugging shape.

4.) Somehow trailing off into an insane mental dialogue about whether or not all of the problems in his and Jem’s relationship can be boiled down to the fact that they almost always seem to have opposite waking and sleeping schedules in the morning and at night, despite having lived together several different times in several different houses between both Wellington and New Orleans and, during these times (including the present one), having thrived interpersonally in some way or another.

4a.) Internally conceding that because he and Jem never shared a bedroom until this particular instance of cohabitation, they never would have had to examine this discrepancy between them at quite the same magnitude.

4b.) Unthinkingly murmuring, “Holy shit, I’m awful,” into the bowl of the sink.

4c.) When Kory, passing into the bathroom to grab her makeup bag, replies without missing a beat, “No you’re not,” reaching over to brush an affectionate hand over her back – a gesture she returns along with a kiss.

5.) Sharing the mirror with Kory while she applies an age-appropriately thin coat of eyeliner and lip gloss and he attacks his face with his two-in-one facial cleanser/beard shampoo.

6.) Shooing Kory out of the bathroom so he can relieve himself of urine pent up after over eight hours of sleep.

7.) Haphazardly constructing an outfit in the bedroom that somehow communicates his slightly-depressed-but-not-really-giving-a-fuck mood this morning: a pair of alternately hideous and fashion forward paisley joggers and an XL waffle knit sweater rescued from the women’s section in the Goodwill on Tulane Avenue.

8.) Coming downstairs.

9.) Seeing what’s on television (this late morning:  _ The Chew _ on Hulu, which,  _ vomit _ ).

10.) Making coffee.

11.) Checking the drawer in the kitchen for replacement oil for his vape pen.

11a.) Finding none and then, for the second time this morning, expelling a hellish sound.

12.) Yelling to the household on his way out of the door, “I’m going to Frady’s! I’ll be right back!”

13.) Ignoring all sounds of dissent and heading down the street.

The Bywater, to Mako, feels foreign and magical – exotic, even – the way women in old (and sometimes, sadly enough, new) books and films are described, with sultry eyes and tantalizing, rolling curves – but only if the women have gap-toothed smiles, skin as black as night and wet with sweat, resting heart rates of three-hundred and eighty beats per minute, and joints perpetually burning between their lovely, boney fingers. In the bleach-colored Sunday morning, he walks from the house to Frady’s One-Stop Food Store on Piety and counts the sights, smells, and happenings that greet him through the two minutes to the convenience store and back: the woman across the street from his house, standing on her porch in a paisley housedress and singing her usual song at the pubescent children swarming with plastic water guns in front of her house, “You can’t touch my pussy! You can’t! Get from out of here!”; fairy lights strung across the front porch of the tiniest, bluest house Mako has ever seen; Tibetan prayer flags hanging off of the jade green residence across from that one, faded by sunlight and inert in the Louisiana heat; the near-abstract graffiti doodle of what looks like a pig’s face topped by a tiara on the side of some long brick structure; a mural of dancing skeletons, puppy dogs, and kittens playing tubas and toting umbrellas; a French-style balcony rendered in black, twisted wrought iron; squat palm trees; the street names LOUISA and DAUPHINE in blue uppercase letters on the sidewalk; the yellow-walled BARGAIN CENTER again, with racks full of delightfully tacky hand-me-downs stationed just outside the door; a fleeting portrait of some red-eyed beauty in white and pink chalk on the pavement; pencil-thin young women clad in black bicycle shorts and Glass Animals T-shirts and orange lipstick and owl-eyed sunglasses; a maroon Ford truck with “Living the Dream” inscribed in curling, loopy green letters on the back window; Satsuma Café, throbbing and crowded with hipsters as always; an old woman with a thick white braid swinging down her back as she bicycles leisurely down the street, singing, “ _ We’re going to the chapel and we’re gonna get ma-a-arried… _ ”; the squirrel that drops out of the hawthorn tree and just barely catches Mako’s shoulder with its tail on its descent before scurrying away across the street; and, finally, Frady’s mustard yellow wooden siding, the neon OPEN sign in the dinky side window.

At the counter, a pot-bellied white man reads the Times-Picayune and sweats through a bowling shirt that is not white, but has no discernible color.

Mako, looking more New Orleanian than he even knows with his major duty arm tattoos – the aquatic culturally appropriative sleeve on the left and his namesake, the shark, on the right – earlobes stretched, silver-speckled hair a mess, scans the tobacco accessories behind the counter and does not find his favored Solace Salts E-Liquid. “Shit,” he mutters without thinking.

“I heard  _ that _ ,” the clerk drawls, his inflection one of agreement rather than outrage. Before Mako is even able to make sense of the fact that he’s being talked to, the clerk is continuing on: “Sometimes it’s like that, isn’t it? Personally, this whole day is a ‘ _ shit _ ’ kind of day for me. Noh’mally I don’t work Sundays, but the regular guy, he just got his child custody hoopla sorted out and this is the first weekend he’s spendin’ with his kids in what, nine months? So I told him I’d cover. Tryna get on my good karma thing, y’know.” For the first time since Mako walked in, the clerk actually looks at him, takes in his somewhat perplexed self. His round face opens into a genial smile that, to Mako, appears as an opaque, indiscernible assortment of shapes. “What’ll it be, huh? We got a new batch of po-boys ‘bout to come out the back.”

“Uh, no thanks.” Because it’s always easier to look at lifeless products than it is to look at a human face, Mako returns his visual attention to the display of tobacco accessories and says, “You guys don’t have the Solace E-Liquid anymore?”

The clerk shakes his massive head slowly, almost sorrowfully, Mako’s poverty so personally heartbreaking to him. “We ran out yeste’day. Some woman wit’ no hair come in, bought all the rest of ‘em. But we should restock by tomorrah.”

“Fuck, man, whatever.” Mako feels around in his pocket for his wallet. “I’ll take my chances with what you have.”

Without warning, the clerk goes from middle-aged white New Orleanian straight to millennial dopehead in tone: “Yeah, man,” he drawls. “Be adventurous.”

Mako walks home with Salt Naked 100 E-Liquid in “Frost Bite” flavor. The squirrel falls on him; the water gun platoon disperses; he smokes for five minutes on his lonesome stone patio; then it’s back inside to make a grocery list with his family.

“Okay, kids, time to make your unrelenting desires heard,” he announces to the congregation, cross-legged on the floor in front of the coffee table with a mug of Hawaiian Blend, his favorite ballpoint, and a legal pad. “What do we need?”

“Orange juice,” Jem says at the same time that Kory says, “Apple juice.” Mako marks both down.

“Ginger beer,” Mum puts in from her chair. “Alcoholic content up to your discretion.”

“Non-alcoholic… ginger… beer,” Mako narrates as he jots the words down. When he adds, in tinier handwriting and a verbal undertone, “No… drunk… Mums,” Mum snatches her bandana off her head and throws it at him, managing to catch him directly in the nose.

“Milk!” Kora chimes. “I tried to have a bowl of Frosted Flakes this morning and it was so sad and small.”

“Any non-beverage contributions?” Mako asks.

“What are you thinking about for dinner?” is Jem’s answer – a question with a question.

“I don’t know, I’ve been awake for maybe two whole seconds.”

“Can we order takeout again?” Kora wonders aloud, so hopeful it’s almost sweet.

“ _ No _ , we  _ cannot _ ,” Mum replies. “Pick up some salmon, we can put them in a skillet with some butter and lemon.”

“Isn’t that kind of fancy?” Jem asks, his already moderately squinty eyes growing the slightest bit squintier with the query.

“Of course it’s fancy, it’s Sunday,” Mum says. “We’re allowed to indulge ourselves on Sunday, eh. It’s how God wanted it.”

“I don’t think that’s how the Abrahamic God works.” Jem is wearing his knowing yet slightly sheepish expression, the cute one that would make Mako want to kiss him if he were facing him and could see it. “I wouldn’t know, though, I’m a poor little lapsed Jewboy.”

“What about gumbo?” Mako finally says, already scribbling out the ingredients before anyone can even answer. “That’s nice, good, Louisiana fare, right?”

“As long as you’re cooking,” Mum says. Mako decides to ignore her.

Soon, after five minutes more of the same familial back-and-forth, the Gehringer-Ngata-Tui clan has assembled a grocery list that looks like this:

#    
  
  
  


_ orange juice  
_ _ apple juice  
_ _ non-alcoholic ginger beer  
_ _ no drunk mums  
_ _ milk  
_ _ roux  
_ _ file powder  
_ _ stock??  
_ _ bell peppers  
_ _ onions  
_ _ celery (MAYBE)  
_ _ shrimp  
_ _ butter  
_ _ granola bars  
_ _ strawberry banana juice  
_ _ pineapple mango juice  
_ _ cranberry juice  
_ _ lots of juice   
_ _ cream cheese  
_ _ something cakey, like cake  
_ ~~_ grep _ ~~ _ grapes (not green)  
_ _ plums  
_ _ a pomegranate?  
_ _ oranges  
_ _ chicken breasts  
_ _ the pizza lunchables  
_ _ SALMON  
_ _ Tony Chachere’s  
_ _ oregano  
_ _ cinnamon  
_ _ california pizza kitchen  
_ _ grated mozzarella   
_ _ nice bottle of wine  
_ _ rosewater  
_ _ ice cream  
_ _ cookie dough _

#    
  
  
  


Mako finishes a second cup of java before he, Jem, and Kory head out, Mum having made her desire to stay home and “enjoy her Sabbath day with a book” as crystal clear as humanly possible. When he tells Kory to put something on, that it can get rather chilly in the grocery store, she spends five minutes upstairs trying on, presumably, every single jacket she owns and then some, before coming downstairs wearing Mako’s graphically very busy bomber jacket that reaches to her mid-thighs, how big it is on her.

Mako gives her a Look. “You feelin’ alright, my fish?”

Kory doesn’t quite avoid his eyes as she walks out the door, the slightest of skips in her step. Her voice is its usual melodic chirp: “I’m fine!”

So they put their masks on, pile into the Jetta, and head off for Rouses on Baronne, Mako the designated driver, Jem riding shotgun, and Kory a happy, nervous little bird in the backseat.

To tell the truth, Mako abhors the grocery store. There isn’t a place in the world full of quite so many treasures and quite so much junk. It’s scary and big and the perfect environment in which, even with an already preordained list, he might blow all kinds of disposable income on checkout queue-adjacent chewing gum and oven mitts with cats on them and maybe two or seven bottles of wine and literally every flavor of Fuse drink known to man. Of course, there are the ever so enticing prepackaged, individualized snack cakes for the extremely low price of $1.94. There is the long, drawn-out contemplation re: exactly what brand of yogurt is the right one for you (Dannon or Yoplait or Oikos or Chobani or Fage or Stonyfield or maybe Activia for gastrointestinally challenged Tauruses whose horoscopes told them to go healthy in their eating habits) instead of three, maybe four equally reliable brands to choose from. There is so much time wasted on giving into eyes much bigger than stomachs. There is the receipt screaming _YOUR WHOLE LAST PAYCHECK_ at you, and the irresistible urge to say, “This is fine,” and toddle in blind-drunk consumerist happiness on home. Mako’s apprehension around the supermarket is so great, in fact, that were he a childless bachelor, he’d very likely die of starvation, malnutrition, or diabetes just avoiding the necessary biweekly trips to stock up on foodstuffs, instead neurotically sustaining himself with nicotine and convenience store junk food alone. Still – his life is that of a moderately functional autistic-bipolar adult with a family who needs and expects mutual support from him, so off to the store in their late-nineties hooptie they go, arm-in-arm in spirit if not in actuality.

On the drive over, Mako listens to both Jem and Kory’s idle chitchat and his Elton John mix on the AUX channel. He takes in the New Orleans streets, uncannily similar to and yet wholly different from those of his birth city: the Crayola-color two-story buildings shaped like Lego blocks and packed right into the curb, the omnipresence of greenery to remind one of their continued existence in a real ecology. Less hilly than Wellington, though. Poorer and wilder, with the roads schizophrenic and littered with both potholes and consumerist-alcoholic detritus, with the graffiti-encrusted walls and their exclamations of  _ ACHOO! _ and  _ BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL _ in sharpish balloon letters. Regretting his decision to wear a sweater in the oppressively wet November ( _ November _ ) heat, he ratchets up the air conditioner, sighing softly when that doesn’t do much to alter the internal climate of the car. Whether it’s because of the unquestionable age of the vehicle (a 1990 Jetta is absolutely stellar on an aesthetic level – not so much in terms of function) or the fact that New Orleans nearly always doubles as Satan’s armpit in atmosphere alone, he doesn’t know. 

They arrive at Rouses sticky with perspiration and, at least on Mako’s part, mostly unprepared for the sheer volume of human bodies present on this glorious Sunday afternoon. Time to strap on a will to live and all the God-given serenity he can hold onto while still commandeering a shopping cart and trying his damnedest to avoid a head-on collision with a shopper less careful than himself.

Father, partner, and daughter make their way through the store at a pace that cannot decide whether it is leisurely or simply hampered by the presence of so many other lobster-red-necked, sluggishly waddling penguin people. Jem shoots Mako stupid, concerned looks every three minutes or so until Mako tells him firmly to, “Cut it out, I’m fine.” Despite this profession to utter fineness, he finds himself lingering pathetically in the dimly-lit, almost cathedral section of the store devoted to alcohol while Kory skips off to the bakery in search of pound cake and Jem collects Tony’s, oregano, and cinnamon from a couple of aisles over. He hungrily, curiously eyeballs a Granny Smith green bottle – vaguely appreciating the winged nymph illustrated above the label reading  _ ABSINTHE: Jacques Senaux _ in mystical white letters – until Jem alerts him to his returned presence by dropping his goods into the shopping cart, all the metallic clanging noises that come along with that.

“What’s up?” he says, in his hushed-loud-because-he’s-in-a-store voice. Then, glancing at what Mako has gathered on his own (that is: a new mouse-on-a-string cat toy that’s nearly identical to one Stevie already has at home, some grapefruit Abitas, and a dozen eggs – all non-list items), he goes in with, “Wait, what is this? I thought we were getting stuff, this is nothing.”

“Well… I don’t know what I want for dinner.”

Jem quirks an eyebrow. “You said you knew this morning.”

“I was undecided…” Mako slowly turns to look at Jem, gradually recovering his memory and, perhaps, his presence of mind with every minute degree of rotation. “I did say I wanted gumbo, right?”

In reply, Jem’s features gel, go soft and buttery as they almost always do in the face of Mako’s often slightly desperate existence. He steps just into the sphere of his personal space – not so close as to betray the intimate nature of their relationship to onlookers, but close enough to telegraph such kindness and concern and love for this ridiculousness, even when it’s frustrating, even when it isn’t quite fun. “Are you okay?” he asks, pulling his mask briefly away from his mouth and risking public verbal and possibly physical mutilation.

Calculating Jem’s own calculation of this risk, Mako decides to sigh and say, “I’m living.”

Jem skates his eyes over all six feet and two inches of him; seeming to notice his pants for the first time today, he makes a noise like  _ snerk _ and murmurs, “What are you even wearing, mate?”

"Why does it always come down to clothes with you when you can't dress yourself like a non-blind-person? Like a non-randomized Sim from the bestselling Maxis series  _ The Sims? _ ”

Jem makes the noise again. "You mean like a  _ seeing _ person?"

“I’m looking at absinthe,” Mako abruptly informs him, apropos of basically nothing, turning to face the Jacques Senaux again and even going so far as to remove it from the shelf. “Do you remember that time when we were in Blaise’s class? And we went to his house and–”

“Drank that absolute shit absinthe?” Jem finishes over his shoulder. “I remember. That’s how he and Loren got together, right? And what, now they have a beautiful four year-old and a condo on Oriental Parade.”

“Capitalist normcore dreams really can come true,” Mako hums.

“That was so bitchy.”

Mako replaces the absinthe on the shelf. “You love it,” he coos.

They find Kory and her crush in the bakery: a pubescent Māori mermaid and a moderately pimply teenage baker with earrings and a beard and a tattoo of an anchor on his bicep. Mako – and Jem as well, if the way he cuts his eyes at him, barely stifling laughter and fighting not to double over, is anything to go on – is struck as if with an anvil by the realization that his fourteen year-old may have a slight Electra complex; self-conscious and a little bit bewildered, he pulls his sweater down over the aquatic sleeve tattoo on his left arm, tugs nervously on his plugs, and rolls his shopping cart over to where Kory stands at the counter, cradling a block of pound cake in her arms as if it is an infant.

“Oh yeah,” Kory is saying over her foolishly lowered tie-dye mask, in a weird floriated tone of voice Mako has never heard from her before. “I  _ love _ The Beach Boys. They’re so  _ vibes _ , you know?”

“Totally,” Mini-Mako replies, so sunglasses indoors, turquoise rings, Grandpa sweater cool it hurts. Mako wants to kill himself.

Instead, he does the Lamest of Dads thing and shamelessly injects himself into the conversation: “They’re also hella racist, you know.”

Mini-Mako and Kory turn to him wearing expressions of confusion and happy mortification, respectively. Mini-Mako visibly takes him in – an utter stranger wearing the outfit of a clown or, possibly, a Crescent City crustpunk hobo, corona of curls streaked heavily with silver and beard verging on scary grandfather hipster territory, in quasi-professor mode as he articulates in his strange Kiwi accent that about half the Americans he encounters have at least a little trouble understanding even without the obstruction of a coronavirus mask, “Early in their career they stole music from Chuck Berry and profited immensely from it. I’m not even sure they were actually penalized; did I mention the justice system is also pretty racist? Because it is.  _ Surfin’ USA _ is still a bop, though.”

“Uh,” Mini-Mako says.

“Daddy!” Kory cries – somewhere in the hilarious space between I’m-happy-to-see-you and what-are-you-doing,-crazy? Stepping closer to, ostensibly, demonstrate to her bakery paramour that the insane man is, in fact, known and related to her, she reaches over to pull ambiguously on the beads of Mako’s bracelet and say, “Of course, I can always count on you to police my listening habits.”

“Police? Nah.” Mako gives Kory’s ponytail a gentle, affectionate yank or two – not hard enough to send her head careening backward, just sufficient force to make the hair bounce up and down. “I’m just providing you with a cultural education, baby.”

In the background, Jem is the color of a pomegranate and trying valiantly not to lose it. More on him a little later.

Mini-Mako, on the other hand, has eyes that have blown to the size of small saucers. He blinks, hard, at Kory. “This is… this is your  _ dad? _ ”

“Oh, yes,” Mako hums, casting his eyes up toward the ceiling in an overwrought expression of pure dreaminess. “I can remember like it was only yesterday, holding this newborn angel in my arms on March 2 nd , 2010 at 6:34 PM. My whole life changed on March 2 nd , 2010 at 6:34 PM. I’ve never been the same.”

Conveniently, the bakery manager sticks her head out of the back room at that very moment to say, “Travis! I need you to come clean out this oven for me, before Crystal gets here to bake.” Apparently endowed with the ability to both do mental math and follow directions, Mini-Mako – sorry, Travis – disappears with the manager with only the briefest and most artificial of smiles in the direction of the Gehringers, leaving them staring each other down Wild West-style while Jem finally gives in to the urge to explode with laughter, slapping his knees and coughing and everything.

“Could he be more like me?” Mako asks. He pauses to screw up his lips in thought. “I am more loquacious, I’ll give you that.”

“He wasn’t  _ loquacious _ ” – Kory says the word mockingly – meanly, actually – but Mako is simply proud that she’s using it in a sentence – “because you were being a, a–”

“I will institute a swear jar.”

“A butthole. You were being a butthole.”

“Kory…” Mako takes his daughter’s hand and places it on the handle of the shopping cart next to his, then begins to roll away in the direction of produce, gently forcing her to be tugged along. “You’re fourteen years old.”

“Wow,  _ thanks _ , like I didn’t know that,” she snaps. Mako would be concerned about the sarcasm and the pissiness if he didn’t know perfectly well where it came from (i.e., him, directly). “I wasn’t going to do anything with him. We were just talking.”

“I know you were. I just thought–”

“I know, I know, you just thought we should be transparent.” Kory stares off into the middle-distance of the store as they amble along, dodging old ladies and fathers with beer bellies. She doesn’t flinch away when Mako puts his hand on top of hers on the handle, but she doesn’t say anything more for the remainder of their time in the store.

Mako tries for détente via snowballs. Despite the ice cream and pizza melting and the pomegranates and grapes wilting in the trunk, he drives their trio fifteen minutes out to the SnoWizard on Magazine, where they sit in the parking lot just outside the baby blue brick structure, sucking on ice and slurping candy-colored syrup through plastic red spoon straws. He and Kory share the Jetta’s dusty black hood, sweater sleeves rolled up and masks and jacket off, while Jem stands less than two feet in front of them, enjoying his frostified wedding cake with less-than-audible  _ hmm _ s.

The November sun hangs as a hot white ornament in the paleness of the sky, spelling minor disaster for the groceries and a welcome sheen of sweat for our family of three after the overly refrigerated chill of the store. Mako, in his well-practiced and fatherly way, surreptitiously watches for the detached tension in Kory’s face to begin slipping away, as it does, with every mouthful of flavored pink ice, then – when she appears totally calm and totally in tune with the bustling, vegetative uptown that surrounds her, the way she often did when they first moved here and she took to New Orleans like an ocean fish to much longed for saltwater – he flicks his head sideways like a horse and says, “I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings, Kora. You know I’m just your stupid old dad.”

“You’re not stupid,” Kory replies with a surprising swiftness, as if she’d been holding the words in and only needed his prompting to release them. She, having done away with her ponytail in the car to let her long hair fall down around and shield her face in fantastically brooding fashion, tucks her snowball momentarily between her thighs to wrap both hands around her wild mocha mane and fasten it atop her head in a messy bun. Acts like these remind Mako of her mother.

“It’s just–” Kory says, waiting until he looks at her to continue. “I felt like you didn’t take me seriously.”

“Of course I did. I do.” Mako pauses to munch on blueberry frost. “I take you so seriously, in fact, that I want the pizza-faced boys you like to take you seriously, too.”

“ _ Pizza-faced? _ ” Kory echoes, as Jem snorts with laughter. She scoops some of her own frost into her mouth, then speaks with her mouth full of it: “He was  _ not _ that bad.”

“Oh, no. You deserve someone with some Clearasil, my love.” With that and Kory’s magical, unbearable, stomach-shredding unicorn giggle, he leans over to press his lips to the apple of her left cheek, smearing transparent aquamarine in his wake. Jem grins at him on his way out of the kiss, remarks, “Your tongue and lips are blue, babe. You look like you’re dying.”

Mako shrugs, opens his mouth to show Jem all of his pretty blueberry teeth. “Dead man chic.”

They sing along to The Beach Boys all the way home.

That night, after decimating a whole pot of gumbo and collectively attending to the evenings dishwashing duties, Mako, Jem, and Kory gather on the living room rug with their guitars and, for the latter, the pair of bongos she received for her twelfth birthday, when she was going to be a performance artist-cum-drummer in the French Quarter for a living. For five minutes they tune their instruments together – teasing each other, pulling faces like children – and yes, Kory must simply deal with it when Mako, in the middle of playing with his D string, is pulled into to a grinding halt and a kiss across his guit, his folded legs, and the inch or two of wool that separates him from Jem – big manly hands pulling on the back of his neck and bracketing his jaws like a popped collar. Ouu.

Ouuuu _. _

“Whatever, y’all,” Kory says, summarily turning her attention from her gay ass dad to her smartphone, her thumbs flying like fish over the screen. The fact that she actually uses the word  _ y’all _ like a born-and-bred Louisianan never ceases to tickle Mako hot shades of pink.

Mako peers at Jem from beneath lowered, almost bedroomy lids. He reaches out to strum the other’s guitar, open and angled over Jem’s lap, with the calloused pad of his left thumb. “Please don’t say something like ‘you did good today,’ because if you do, I will eat your eyeballs.”

Jem crumples his face in the middle, incredulous. “I was going to say ‘I love you,’ but okay.”

“I was so mad at you this morning,” Mako says, but he really wasn’t, but he’s not thinking and he’s going in for another one, already catching Jem’s upper lip with his lower.

“I know,” Jem breathes into the kiss, then stops entirely. Breathing, that is.


	6. 06

#  _ 6 _

Wellington, 2003. The new millennium was a bust. A country bumpkin in almost every way, Mako Gehringer, age sixteen, reappeared in the city of his birth wearing his heathen heart full of mourning right on his chest like a fat brass pin, wearing teenage anger along with it, wearing teeth. Mum was going to start teaching uni again, but on the day of their arrival, June was young and school wouldn’t begin for approximately nine more weeks. This gave her time to conceive lesson plans and hobnob with academics, and Mako time to prowl through Wellington with his farmer’s hands shoved deep in his pockets and his pretty brown head thrown up defiantly, showing off his gold earrings (the lobes pierced when he was seven with the aid of an orange-third, not that anyone was asking) and his mud- and paint-stained work boots (gained as a requirement of long days spent shepherding in Raukokore, not as a fashion statement).

He passed much time with Robbie that winter – time he would have otherwise spent alone, consciously cultivating his wrath, depression, and confusion with the world. The elder Gehringer child was already a sophomore going on juniorhood at Victoria U at the time, but he – for reasons Mako still hasn’t quite puzzled out – didn’t mind blocking off weekday afternoons and evenings to treat his little bro to Asia-Pacific fusion and marijuana kept in hollow pill bottles in his panty-filled underwear drawer. Mako, no real stranger to weed, didn’t need to be told to inhale and how to let the smoke collect in the pit of his lungs until the moment felt right and he was ready to burst, but he let Robbie tell him anyway, because sometimes he was a nice person.

When neither Mum nor Dad let him speak at length about the human-shaped hole in his stomach – big enough for homunculi to build flats in and call the ambiance acidic or homey – he’d call Robbie and get picked up in a ’97 Camaro with the top down, perfect for him to hop right in. Robbie would put clear quartz stones on his forehead, neck, wrists, and belly to “cleanse him” of “spiritual toxins” and plug the time, date, and place of his birth into a CD-ROM program called AstroMetrics, after which he’d  _ hmm _ and  _ ahh _ at his natal chart, saying things like “Oh, my God, it all makes sense” and “You’ve got so much Scorpio in you, dude.”

Mako would give him the slightest of sneers. “I thought I was a Libra.”

Robbie would sneer right back, levitating his eyeballs as if he was a genius consorting with morons (which, in his estimation, he almost always was). “That’s your  _ Sun sign _ ,” he’d explain, then sit Mako beside him at his hand-me-down clamshell iBook and illuminate all the intricacies of the cosmos at the instance of his birth, tell him how the stars destined him to feel this way, to have such difficulty letting go of things and such propensity to losing those things in the first place, but not to worry – “Your sex life is gonna be awesome, bro.”

Two weeks before school began at Wellington High School, the counselor read Mako’s name off his transcript from Raukokore, gasped as if she were in a movie, and asked him, “ _ Gehringer? _ Do you know  _ Robbie _ Gehringer?”

“He’s my brother,” Mako said. He didn’t feel particularly spiritually clean after their last session with the crystals that morning, but it was whatever.

Together, he and the breathless counselor built his schedule based on his past excellence at his Raukokore school as well as his expressed desire for an extracurricular that would “destroy all thought whatsoever” – his words. It looked like this:

**_GEHRINGER, MAKO KAHURANGI_ **

**1** FRENCH I Brager, J 8:30 – 9:20 AM

 **2** ALGEBRA II (REG) Hymel, G 9:30 – 10:20 AM

 **3** CHEMISTRY (REG) Hiatt, O 10:30 – 11:20 AM

LUNCH PERIOD 11:20 – 12:20 PM

 **4** ENGLISH III (HONS) Ernst, K 12:30 – 1:20 PM

 **5** WORLD HISTORY (HONS) Schaberg, C 1:30 – 2:20 PM

 **6** ART HISTORY Burgess, P 2:30 – 3:20 PM

 **7** THEATRE III Peltier, B 3:30 – 4:20 PM

“Are you sure you want to be in theatre, hon?” Again, this utterance of hers had a sort of filmic significance and gravitas that Mako wasn’t sure if he found annoying or kind of sweet. “There’s always, um... dance?”

“Theatre is fine,” Mako said in such a way that conveyed the maximum possible amount of that’s thatness. The counselor printed his schedule out for him on coral pink copy paper, and after tucking it into his backpack, he rode on back to Mum’s house on his busted country bicycle.

He spent the remainder of his free late winter days sitting in his bedroom window, playing with Nana’s heirloom rings, and memorizing the view from 50 Salamanca Road, peeling his eyeballs over 45 across the street, its sloping fence encircling the front yard and the shrubs shaped like fuzzy herbivorous animals. This had been the first grand movement of his life – smaller in scale than the move from Wellington to New Orleans that would take place fourteen years later, and certainly less shell-shocking, considering he’d spent weekends here with Dad since he'd moved to Raukokore at the age of seven. Still, every cell in him felt constricted of air and water and love and the color green. He then lived in the mouth of Maui’s fish instead of along its dorsal side. He did not wake to the convivial baaing of sheep named Etta James and Elvis Presley (both ewes); instead, it was the rolling of tires right outside the window: the monotonous song of suits on their way to work. This movement was a requiem, and the music of Wellington just did not play along.

Brager, J; Ernst, K; and Burgess, P all asked him on his first day of class the very same question as the counselor: “Do you know Robbie Gehringer?” They’d followed the query up with that knowing, exasperated expression familiar to anyone familiar with Robbie G: “I  _ loved _ him,” and they said it like the love was conditional on Robbie walking into class on time, deigning to raise his hand before he shot his fat mouth off, and wearing dress-code appropriate clothing that didn’t show off the crack of his ass or, God forbid, one or both of his nipples.

Mako nodded his dark, curly head and replied, “He’s my brother,” and he automatically knew he’d be a teacher’s favorite, all thanks to the undeniable charisma of his crazy older bro.

A face floated in the background of nearly every one of his classes. Had Mako possessed then the particular degree of neuroticism he does today, he’d have been a tad irked if not simply alarmed by the continual, almost haunting reappearance of this face. His brain would have latched onto this face: this Ray-Ban-bespectacled, gap in the two frontmost teeth, moderately squinty-eyed, sad, sad-looking face; this face that habited without exception the back left corner of each classroom; this face flanked on each side by minky, adolescent Jewish sideburns and topped by hair that resembled a fluffy black bird stuck mid-flounder, very likely the victim of gratuitous mussing and/or a possible lack of a hairbrush; this face of one Jeremiah Tui, the pastiest Māori in the whole school.

Jeremiah Tui’s face greeted him for the sixth time in Peltier, B’s Theatre III class. Over the course of the previous seven hours, Mako had gathered from the murmuring and small talk of classmates that Peltier, B – otherwise known exclusively by his given name, Blaise – was alternately the most adored and, if not despised, mildly disfavored teacher at Wellington High School.

“He’s soooo skux, bro. What other teacher goes by his first name, eh?”

“I never really felt comfortable in his class. That’s why I switched out of theatre for dance.”

“Word is we’re doing an actual Halloween show this year. Blaise bought the rights for this mean-as American play. Can you believe?”

“I mean, I’m not saying he’s a shit teacher. I’m just saying we never actually did anything, you know?”

“We didn’t have to do anything to pass! Just show up, and boom: instant A.”

“Did you hear he’s getting a divorce? No wonder his class sucks.”

“What’s divorce got anything to do with it? I wouldn’t mind cheering him up, f’you know what I mean.”

“Blaise? That dude is munted, bro.”

“Blaise? That dude is choice.”

Mako walked into Blaise’s class that afternoon brimming with uncorroborated opinions and ready and waiting for a proper outlet for his mourning. He was given, among other things, Jeremiah’s poor, dejected face to look upon, the boy sneaking him sharp, furtive little glances as if Jeremiah was so damn tired of seeing him stand his country ass up in the front of the classroom, blandly introducing himself and avoiding direct eye contact with anyone.

So when Blaise strolled in three minutes after the tardy bell and asked him to make his introduction to a theatre class that had existed in its current assortment for the past two years, entirely unaltered save for the dropping out of a couple of scaredy cats in freshman year, Mako decided to shake up his boring, prescribed name-and-hello act. For Jeremiah Tui’s sake if no one else’s.

“Um… well,  _ kia ora _ , guys. I guess I should start out with my name. That seems to be the way things are done in polite society. My name is Mako Kahurangi Gehringer, but I’d prefer it if you just called me Mako, as going with the whole name could turn out to be quite a mouthful after a while. Now I’d just like to break the ice, perhaps tell you guys a joke. This joke is gonna go like this: I’m going to tell you all that I’ve just come down from the Bay of Plenty, and as a result my legs are very tired. So what happened with that joke is that, um, I actually  _ have  _ come down from the Bay of Plenty, but in reality I was on a train, and what I’ve done with the joke is I’ve said that my legs are tired, suggesting that I’ve walked the entire way to Wellington, which is not true but is funny. That’s the backstory of the joke.”

Throughout this rambling, charmingly anxious introduction, the various members of Theatre III grew from nervous giggling into full-fledged laughter – laughter at this talkative weirdo with the red leather Michael Jackson jacket, at his delightfully deconstructionist attitude to humor and his vaguely piercing way of looking at everyone, staring right into their eyes like he genuinely longed to know them (and in his way, he did). Everyone, even Blaise, was swept up into the aura of lightness and somehow socially acceptable apprehension of Mako – everyone save Jeremiah Tui, who appeared more and more as though he’d been kicked in the face the longer the other went on.

“My mother named me after a shark, which is a nice way of saying that my mother hates me. My dad has an archaic condition called homosexuality, which is a nice way of saying that my family is broken. I have an older brother that all of my teachers love, Robbie–” He paused to gauge Blaise’s reaction from the back left corner of the room, the man standing right over Jeremiah’s shoulder and, at the mention of Robbie, going wildly pleased around the eyes, so yes: “Which means that all of my teachers will now love me. Choice. My grandmother just died, which means that I’d like to die, too. I hope we all become great friends, and uh. Yeah. That’s all for now.”

He took his seat amid the applause of twelve other teenagers. The girl at his right – a Māori with her long hair streaked with peroxide highlights and a colorful assortment of rings decorating her fingers – turned to him and whispered, “Sorry about your Nan, bro.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m Tatum.” She warmly shook his hand with all of her amethyst, tourmaline, and chrysocolla knuckles. “That’s Kirby, but we all call him Quick.” She indicated the mousy-looking boy just behind her, working (hilariously) at a stick of string cheese and crowned with smallish, wispy, dark chocolate curls. “That’s Loren.” Seated next to Quick was an equally rodenty but undeniably much prettier girl with her wild blonde hair confined to a ponytail, who gave Mako at the moment of her introduction a closemouthed smile so soft and so sweet it nearly aroused tears in him. “And that’s Jeremiah, who we call Jem.”

Jeremiah sat to the left of and behind Mako, hugging himself and refusing eye contact.

“You’re in like, all of my classes, mate,” Mako said.

Jeremiah snorted, blinked, and still declined to look at him. “Wow,” he murmured. And that was it.  _ Wow _ .

**We met in high school – so it was like, the first day of junior year, first theatre class. And I see this guy – he’s in all my classes, mind you, it’s almost like he’s stalking me – and he’s got the** **_Thriller_ ** **jacket on, the actual Michael Jackson** **_Thriller_ ** **jacket, and he’s good-looking, very confident, and I just. Instantly hated him. Instantly could not stand him.**

**I can’t believe you thought I was confident.**

**It was your aura, it was like… bright blue, as Tate would say.**

**I was a mess, dude. And I wasn’t good looking. But yeah, if you print a picture of me from 2003 and show it to Jem, just, a little shadow ripples through him and he has to look at me now to remind himself that he actually likes me.**

That afternoon, Tatum distinguished herself in a fashion that Mako would come to realize, within a handful of years, constituted all people of the female persuasion that qualified as his type, much as he hated to think of himself in such predictable, banal ways. She made a point to know him is the thing. She refused to fade into the background of his spatial awareness. She bid a flamboyant goodbye to her Theatre III comrades at the chiming of the end of class bell – kissing Quick, Loren, and Jeremiah on their much-kissed cheeks before skipping away so that her Carrie Bradshaw kimono jacket fluttered movie star enticingly in the wind – then informed him in no uncertain terms that she would walk with him on his way home that afternoon.

“I have a bike, though,” he said.

“So do I,” was her reply. “What, are our legs broken?”

Robbie would have said that his acquiescence was a manifestation of his peacekeeping Libran nature. Mako knew it was that he’d fallen in love, just as soon as she’d gently sat and shat on him.

Tatum, in the way most friendly people did in the face of others exposing their trauma, peeled the skin of her arm back and exposed some trauma of her own on their first thirty-minute walk from Wellington High to Salamanca Road. She told Mako of the death of her father just three years prior, the way he’d been ripped out of her life through the reverse miracle of a surprise shotgun blast to the face on a fishing trip near the outskirts of Christchurch. When she asked Mako what had happened to his Nana Victoria, he’d been strangely tempted to undo eleven years of backwater socialization, to rip out the equally honest and blackberry-sweet roots that existed and had been planted within him through the good horticultural work of his sanctified Nan, to lie and say some citified bullshit designed to make Tatum gasp and widen her obsidian eyes and turn her face away from him – but he didn’t. He stayed true and said, “Stomach cancer.”

Tatum frowned at him with such genuine sadness that he could have fallen into the earth, screaming, and remained there for months. “I’m so sorry, bro,” she intoned.

New Zealand reeked of tragedy. The whole world did, in fact, but it seemed to Mako at sixteen years old that these two dolorous islands had an extraordinary knack for catastrophe of the most mundane sort. He and Tatum were two of the many survivors of this knack, and there was a part of him that loved it even in his crazy, stupid, grief-stricken anger toward it.

Sitting side-by-side in class and walking home together afterward soon became their thing. As the semester’s first week became the second week, and then became the third week, and then the fourth, and so on, they were joined with increasing frequency by Quick and Loren, who both lived in the same general direction as they did and were coming more and more to share Tatum’s instantaneous, half-infatuated affection for Mako – a distinctly adolescent adoration that became progressively mutual with every Theatre III afternoon. Quick, as his name had prophesized, had a rapid-fire voice and a gently ironic nature, always and without any hesitation trailing Blaise’s comments and quibbles in class with his own sarcastic little observations that earned him sideways looks and absolutely no punishment whatsoever. He, a hypoglycemic, had no problem handing out snacks from the miniature treasure trove he kept in his backpack; it was under his supervision that the friend group remained well-fed and sugared up in their seventh-hour rehearsals and improv sessions, and for this he was adored. Loren, on the other hand, Mako quickly learned was the designated mother hen of the flock, who walked with a quirky bounce in her step, answered Blaise’s questions with unwavering accuracy, always had Tweety Bird Band-Aids and ponytail holders at the ready, and gently  _ tsk _ ed at all of Tatum’s questionable fashion choices over lunch, reaching over to brush dried grass out of the other girl’s Brooke Shields hair and wondering aloud, “Why can’t you just dress like a twenty-first century teenager, eh? Always have to retro-it-up, you.”

This, Mako adored about Tatum. This made him wild in both masculine and feminine ways. Tatum wearing silver bangles and her wavy highlighted hair cascading almost all the way down to her butt, twirling her necklace of plastic beads around her fingers while she took notes in Blaise’s class, popping chewing gum like an ‘80s movie dream girl and showing up to lunch ten minutes late in a surfer’s windbreaker and a corduroy miniskirt, calling things “gnarly” and kissing her friends like they were her kids – this made him want to say, “I love your style, girl, your fearless use of color and pattern,” but also “Kiss me on the mouth for two hours, please.”

**Can you believe Tatum and I dated? Can you believe we had** ** _the_** **_sex?_**

**Uh, like a million years ago? When you were fetuses? Feti? What’s the plural of fetus? Also you’re skipping ahead in the story and I don’t really appreciate that, Mako.**

**_What’s the plural of fetus_ ** **… I’m Googling it.**

**Don’t Google it. Please don’t use my phone to Google the plural of fetus.**

**Too late! It’s fetuses.**

**The more you know. Shall we move on?**

All the while, in the background of every theatre class and every lunchtime hangout and no, not every walk home from school, but every liminal moment before these walks, Jeremiah Tui lurked, dark and dejected around the edges, pointedly not looking at Mako and not speaking to anyone unless directly spoken to. Tatum had given Mako the impression on his first day in theatre that Jeremiah was a member of her previously established group of friends, what with her directly introducing him along with Quick and Loren, but as far as Mako could tell from the kid’s policy of near total non-engagement every time the five of them congregated in class and at lunch, he was a stranger not only to him but to Tatum, Quick, and Loren as well. 

He asked his friends – the very first of their moderately intimate kind, in fact – about this on Thursday afternoon of the last week in August, tired of running scenarios around in his head at night like cute yet slightly terrifying lab rats on his shrill mental treadmills. 

“So, um… what’s the deal with that Jeremiah kid?”

“Jem?” Loren said. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, why doesn’t he talk or even  _ look _ at–” He’d been prepared to say “me,” but, uncomfortable with how whiny it made him sound, changed it at the last second to, “Us. Why doesn’t he talk to us?”

“Oh, he’s probably weirded out by you is all,” Quick explained around a mouthful of saltwater taffy. “He was kind of like that with Loren when she moved down from Auckland freshman year.”

“Except it took him like a week to get used to me.” Loren signaled the gaggle to pause in their collective homeward walk so that she could swiftly retie the loosened laces of her left Keds sneaker. Her voice slightly constricted by her body folded in half, she noted, “I’ve never seen Jem in a funk like this.”

“He’s just super shy, you know.” Tatum fiddled with the end of one of her two French braids as she said this before throwing the whole rope of her hair over her shoulder to bounce against her back as she walked. “And I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t know how to talk to you? We’re kind of his only friends.”

“That sounds so mean,” Loren said, smiling sadly with the utterance.

“It’s true, though,” Quick interjected. He reached over to idly take Loren’s hand in his – meaning nothing flirtatious by it, Mako would later realize – pulling her fingers one-by-one as far away from each other as they would comfortably stretch as he chewed and chuckled and said, “I was his first friend  _ ever _ , I think.”

“You guys are my first friends ever,” Mako admitted. Because they were stopped at an intersection, Tatum was free to slip her arms then around his torso and between his back and backpack, squeezing their bodies together for just a moment and lovingly head-butting his collar like a goat. Like all the goats back in Raukokore. Like Tina Turner when she would nudge with her head his palms and his thighs, sometimes his chest when they were both very little. Like the goats he and Mum sold before they moved back to Wellington, the happy goats now living on farms in Opotiki and Whakatane. Mako head-butted Tatum back, and she called his house after she got home that afternoon.

“Yeah, nah bro.” He could hear her playing No Doubt on her stereo in the background, that jamming reggae fusion that was all the rage at the time:  _ You’re really lovely underneath it all… _ “Jem’ll come around to you eventually. Don’t even worry about him.”

“I feel like I kind of kidnapped his friends, though.”

“Who said anything about kidnapping? We came to you, baby.” She was smiling at that moment – he could feel it through the phone – and then she was repeating for possibly the fifth time that day: “Don’t even worry about Jem.”

The thing of it was this: he couldn’t help but worry.

Every time he spoke in class – any class, really, it didn’t have to be Blaise’s – he could feel those moderately squinty eyes superglued to his back or the side of his face, attempting X-Ray vision or, perhaps more accurately, the spontaneous generation of death lasers. Brager, J would ask, “ _ Qu'est-ce que tu as mangé pour le dîner hier soir? _ ” and Mako, having been called upon randomly, would reply, “ _ J'ai mangé du steak, des pommes de terre, et une salade César. _ ” This, for reasons that escaped him, would arouse incredible rage in Jeremiah; Mako would catch him rolling his eyes up into the very depths of his skull and chewing through his lower lip as if it were a fat wad of gum. The same thing would happen in Algebra II, when Mako’s corner of the room would be reprimanded for loudly losing their shit at Mako’s verbal, sometimes physical, antics; and again in English, when Ernst, K would half-sarcastically compliment Mako for his “energetic” reading of  _ Julius Caesar _ ; and yet again at lunchtime, when Mako would send Loren into a fit of uncontrollable giggles by poking mildly vulgar fun at Blaise’s nipple piercing, which showed through the T-shirts and sweater vests he often wore two sizes too small.

“Oh my God, you broke Loren,” Quick would say, indulging in some laughter himself, and there Jeremiah would be at his left shoulder, boring holes into the table with his Terminator red pupils and visibly trying not to burst right out of his pasty Māori skin.

Mako, in his narcissistic adolescent mind (which, admittedly, has not changed much over the years in its transformation into his narcissistic adult mind) could not fathom being disliked with such intensity, so openly – and yet, considering Jeremiah’s silent and brooding style, so covertly – abhorred. It put a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach – a weak, quavering sensation, indigestion but chillier. As a result, he kind of abhorred Jeremiah in turn. A sitting-in-his-preordained-seat kind of abhorred. A refusal-to-be-his-lab-partner-in-chemistry kind of abhorred. A laughing-at-his-expense-when-he-dropped-his-pudding-cup kind of abhorred. Kid stuff.

It became adult stuff with  _ 70 Scenes of Halloween _ . Blaise’s “mean-as” American play of choice brought some of their worst qualities, their insecurities, and their innermost desires – already subcutaneous on the regular in those days – to a boiling, broiling, purulent head on their skins, until bursting, really, was all they could do. This process began with auditions.

Blaise Peltier – the type of guy who liked to fly by the seat of his pants – fancied himself in addition to an artist a mad scientist of sorts. The Einstein of performance art, he’d call himself, and when his dramatic compatriots would laugh and shake their heads and patronize him by buying him a third if not a fourth drink, he’d keep on keeping on with that lovely little epithet, because he liked it, because it fit well. He was a man who liked to run experiments, to place combinations of placid and volatile factors within the same playing field and watch them react to each other, adding tidbits of baking soda and two- or three-word prompts as the trial went along. It was upon this probing, investigational principal that he based his audition process for  _ 70 Scenes _ .

On the first Monday of September, 2002, Theatre III trickled leisurely into class just as they’d become accustomed to doing in accordance with Blaise’s typically laid-back style. Mako and Tatum were two of the first students in class, chatting offhandedly about  _ 120 Minutes _ on MTV2 and their personal theories on what constituted a truly kicking music video, and as such were two of the first students to be greeted by Blaise’s crocheted reggae hat upturned and filled with folded slips of fluorescent green paper.

“Pick a card, any card,” Blaise drawled in his sharp and high Southland accent, grinning with just a hint of malice as he watched them root around with their fingers like pig snouts in his hat. Initially, they’d grasped the same folded paper before Mako, out of love for Tatum, let her have it and went back to retrieve his own.

It said  _ 7 _ , marked out in red ink from a ballpoint pen. Blaise cooed at him: “Oooh, lucky number seven, Mako. Let’s hope that’s a good sign.”

“What do you mean, ‘ _ a good sign _ ’?”

“We’ve got fourteen slips of paper, here, for each student in the class.” Blaise indicated his hat by gently shaking it. “Two slips are numbered ‘ _ one, _ ’ two are numbered ‘ _ two, _ ’ and so on until ‘ _ seven _ .’ Whoever picks the same number as you is your improv partner for your audition.” Then he grinned that wicked, wolfish grin again, even winked at Mako, which would have been kind of nice if it wasn’t so damn menacing. “We’ll see how things go.”

Tatum’s slip read  _ 3 _ . Mako fiddled with his  _ 7 _ until it was a tiny, crumpled green ball between his fingertips.

Loren came in. She picked  _ 4 _ . Quick arrived soon after; he also picked  _ 4 _ , lucky bastard. Mako internally prepared himself to improv with Esau, for whom he had no particular distaste but whose ultra-solemn style was far from his preference; or with Katerina, whom he knew had a crush on him and, due to lack of reciprocal affection, he made a subtle yet firm point to avoid.

Then Jeremiah bustled into class a mere minute before the tardy bell and was rewarded for his not quite late entrance with the very last slip of paper in Blaise’s obscenely idiotic hat. He fell into his usual seat next to Loren, panting with the exertion of, Mako guessed, having to fit a bathroom break between Art History (which, wonder of wonders, they also shared) and Theatre. Loren, their den mother until the very end, reached over to tidy the boy’s haphazard black curls; she asked, “What’s your number, Jem?”

He said, “Seven.”

Mako, at a loss as to how to otherwise react, immediately devolved into somewhat hysterical laughter – crazy stupid hyenic laughter, barely-hanging-on kind of laughter. Faced with the features of Tatum, Loren, and Quick, all twisted with confusion and concern for his rapidly descending level of sanity, he was compelled not to stop, but to keep going, to double over, to throw his head over his knees and bray like a true ass into the cheap carpeting. Jeremiah knew exactly why; his face, willingly paralyzed and yet growing ever rosier with each passing second, said all this and more.

Blaise closed and, for the first time that semester, locked the classroom door. He gave Theatre III an ominous smile that gradually swept every adolescent presence up into a soft, quiet frenzy that was as horrified as it was impassioned – just the way he liked things. He crossed the room to his swivel chair beside the deathtrap portable aluminum stage, swiftly plopped down, and replaced his hat with a dusty blue steno pad from the desk beside him. He said, “Whoever picked number one, get your pretty little faces up on stage. Auditions begin now.”

**Do you remember that first improv? Oh my** **_God_ ** **, bro, it got so personal.**

**So personal. I would say it was because I liked you and was like, pulling on your pigtails and shoving mud in your face because I didn’t know how to express it like a normal human person, but then I’d be lying. I just couldn’t stand you.**

**Really? Liking me had nothing to do with it?**

**Pssh, no, of course not. Did you secretly like me?**

**That was the whole point, Mako. That’s why I hated you. It was because I liked you so damn much.**

**Sounds like a major contradiction to me.**

**Your face is a major contradiction.**

**And you just love it, don’t you? Oh my God, we’re just like a married couple. I hate us.**

**I hate us, too.**

Esau and Olivia auditioned first, improvising in ultra-Gothic, Amontillado-esque fashion as a serial killer and their soon-to-be victim. Mako wondered briefly, through the minor high of his mounting hysteria, whether all of Blaise’s prompts – which he read off an entirely different set of folded papers retrieved from the size 12 gumboot, petrified by clown red acrylic paint, that the class kept on his computer desk – were Halloween-inspired so as to fit with the theme of the play. His speculation was all but confirmed when Katerina and Storm were asked to ad-lib as a gravedigger and a corpse and Quick and Loren, in what was easily the most absurd scene of the afternoon, crawled around, mewling expressively, as two black cats who were terrified of each other. Throughout the improvisational showcase, Mako noted how Jeremiah Tui could not – would not – keep his eyes off Mako’s person, as if he’d gotten his fill of pointedly averting his eyes and could now not get enough of looking at Mako.

Mako, emboldened by his hatred, simply looked back. Challenged him with his returned stare – “What’re you gonna do?” it said. “You’re stuck with me now, mate.”

They were the last pair onstage.

“You are…” Blaise paused to read the slip of paper coming open between his fingers. “Two guests at a costume party arguing about who has the better costume. You cannot directly tell the audience or each other what you’re dressed as, but you may give hints and are recommended to do so.” He laid his forearms atop each other like a genie, then brought the top one up and then back down again in a droll mimicry of a clapperboard. “ _ Go _ .”

Mako was ready. He came right out of the gate as he always did: swinging.

Circling Jeremiah like the predator he imagined himself to be, puffing his chest all the way up to Australia, he began with the politely disguised, moderately searing taunt known to all Kiwis of Polynesian descent: “What’s good, bro?”

Giggles rang out immediately in the audience. Hot air filled Mako’s head like a balloon, sending his chin up toward the ceiling and his crown cocking back.

Jeremiah, whatever he was, came back in a nasally voice that was not his own. “Many things,” the voice said, creepy and vaguely omniscient in tone. “World peace comes to mind. Ice blocks, cotton candy. Raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens–”

“Check out this sick costume, bro.” With the directive, Mako continued to pace in slow circles around Jeremiah, pausing only to momentarily spread his arms in the universal gesture of COME AT ME with his left leg stuck comically outward and forward, anticipating his next step long before actually taking it. “You like my costume?”

Jeremiah pretended to contemplate his answer for a while, then said, “I do.” He made a show of sniffing, wrinkling his nose up to high heaven until their classmates’ laughter could be heard. “I would say, however, that mine is quantifiably better.”

“’ _ Quantifiable _ ’? You know Pākehās shouldn’t use big words unless they know what they mean, bro.”

This seemed to irritate Jeremiah slightly, but in the detached, smooth and liquid way of an actor embodying their character. Only his eyes belied his true emotion, which was vexed beyond all belief. “I know what it means,” he said. “I can also count. Look–” He began to mime picking at the invisible something that covered his body, waiting until the moment of maximum ambiguity to continue speaking, to say, “There are one thousand, six-hundred and twenty-nine feathers on this costume. Feathers make everything better.”

It was at this point, amid the snickering of the rest of Theatre III, that Mako saw with crystal clarity the way this was going to go. He was going to play the boorish blockhead, Jeremiah was going to be his straight man, and everyone would laugh at it. Their dynamic emerged so fast and so perfectly that they could have ended their feud, or whatever the hell it was, right then and there in the name of comedy gold and the everlasting friendship and love we all know them to be headed for.

Of course, that would have been much too easy.

“Okay, man, but look.” Mako entered Jeremiah’s personal space to nudge him, hard, with his right shoulder. “Look at these mean fins, dude.” He flexed his biceps inward, grinning when Tatum produced a particularly loud gigglesnort in response. “Look at this mean tail.” He twisted at the middle, turning his posterior in Jeremiah’s direction. “Look at all these sharp pearly whites.” With his index fingers, he traced an arch that framed his face, then with those same fingers shoved Jeremiah once again, this time getting the boy directly in the chest. “My dope ass costume could eat your dumb, fool costume like, thirty times over, bro. And I’ll still be munchin’.”

This sent Theatre III into a small uproar of laughter, Tatum’s distinctive snorting, piglet noises pealing out over all the other sounds of mirth. Behind his glasses, out of the audience’s slightly limited view, Jeremiah’s eyes grew angrier still until Mako was sure they’d melt right out of their sockets to reveal the concealed handgun barrels aiming straight for him. This – this rage of Jeremiah’s – made him delirious with joy.

“So, what?” Jeremiah said, in a voice that had slipped almost imperceptibly closer to his natural timbre. “Your costume is better because it can eat mine? Costumes can’t eat. Have you been drinking Julie’s punch?”

“Yo, man…” Mako sidled up until he could speak directly into Jeremiah’s carefully controlled, slightly reddened face. “I think the thing is, ah, the thing is that I'm just, I'm so much cooler than you that it's like, kind of embarrassing."

Jeremiah blinked. “Is that so?”

“Let’s tally it up. I’m like the meanest, coldest animal ever, and you’re what – some wack parrot covered in art feathers?” He mimed plucking a handful of said feathers off Jeremiah and tossing them aside dismissively. “I came here with all your friends, who didn’t even know you’d  _ be  _ at this stupid party. I can dance–” Mako broke off into a five-second moonwalk that threw the entire class into a whirl of whooping applause and tightened the screw in Jeremiah’s jaw just that much more, then came back around to drape his arm around the other boy’s shoulders and conclude, “And even you know this boy is the prettiest face here. Am I right? I'm like, killing you on the coolness front, frankly.”

“Five seconds, guys,” Blaise called out, tapping them off on the edge of his desk.

“You know, there’s one great thing about being a bird,” Jeremiah intoned, his voice suddenly scarily deep in a way that verged hard on both hilarious and mortifying. Slowly, he peeled Mako’s arm off him, then – dropping it with the weight and the suddenness of an anvil thrown out of a window – said, “I can fly away from stupid assholes like you.”

Every part of Mako that had touched Jeremiah’s body had tingled, then, with his whole class exploding in ovation and Blaise scribbling away at his steno pad, lips upturned at the corner. Jeremiah went right back to not looking at him after that, and because of this, it seemed that their relationship status would slip effortlessly back into its pre-auditions state.

It did not.

That Friday, Blaise scrawled out the cast list of  _ 70 Scenes _ on the whiteboard for all the class to see as they milled into the room. The play’s meager five roles were written in the pinkish red of the newest Expo marker; their corresponding actor, in a weak, dying black.

**JEFF** **. . . Jeremiah Tui**

**JOAN** **. . . Loren Atwood**

**THE BEAST** **. . . Mako Gehringer**

**THE WITCH** **. . . Tatum Wharerahi**

**STAGE MANAGER** **. . . Kirby Quickley**

**GHOSTS** **. . . Storm Turei, Katerina Walz, Hugh Watkins, Rooney Talbot**

**See me to talk about lighting and stage crew positions!**

Everyone in class knew at that point for certain that their particular clique in its entirety were Blaise’s favorites, his “golden geese” as he’d later call them in barrooms and bedrooms when they were adults hosting dinner parties and engagement brunches for and with one another. Still, Theatre III congratulated Jeremiah, Loren, Mako, Tatum, and Quick for their newfound attainment of afterschool rehearsals together and late nights spent up memorizing lines and yes, have the afterschool rehearsals spent in incredibly close contact been adequately emphasized? Mako and Jeremiah would be seeing a lot more of each other in the following two months. 

Things might not have been so bad if the play itself – in its content, themes, and truly surrealist style – hadn’t exposed the fault lines that existed in their as of yet nonexistent relationship with each other. The fact that Mako was in a ridiculously Jungian sense Jeremiah’s shadow archetype just as much as Jeremiah was his. The complex inner architecture of a being like their twoship, with such features as an outsized beating, bleeding heart; thin layers of quaking adipose tissue; and a perpetually throbbing headache. The mutual looking, which became both the biggest requirement and the biggest complication of working together. 

Waiting around in the auditorium after class for Blaise to retrieve from his car the plastic laundry basket of clothes he called his “costume bin,” Mako – engaged in a game of slapjack with Tatum in which he, the slapee, occasionally threw the whole thing off to grab the girl’s wrists and gently bite her knuckles – let his gaze stray sideways for a moment only to catch Jeremiah watching them, watching him, with an expression that bordered the countries of Curious and Irritated. Mako narrowed his eyes, barked, “ _ What? _ ” and watched with guilt and pleasure as Jeremiah turned away as if the boy had been struck. Then Mako had been struck by Tatum. Then the side door had been struck by Blaise. Then they’d spent twenty minutes being dressed by Blaise in the dirty clothes of him and his ex-wife. All things they signed up for.

Hanging out in the left wing while Jeremiah and Loren rehearsed the twentieth scene – the two sitting side-by-side on the makeshift sofa, at that time just two large wooden blocks hastily painted black by the freshmen, and arguing as Jeff and Joan in the midst of their crumbling marriage – Mako found himself studying Jeremiah’s profile, the boy’s features contorted with artificial frustration. This was Jeff’s frustration, totally distinct from Jeremiah’s, which Mako had become fairly acquainted with in the first weeks of rehearsal; this was a furrowed brow and the canting forward of the head and neck, not Jeremiah’s hard upper lip and even harder eyes, vitrified into opaque and fragile glass just begging to be broken. It occurred to him then that he’d identified a distinct emotional expression of Jeremiah’s, that this – his codified and recognizable frustration – was something he actually knew about the other, and it pissed him off that he knew it. Why did he have to know anything about Jeremiah? Why did Jeremiah have to be there, complicating his entrance into a Wellington life he’d never asked for, that he’d simply been thrust into because Nana Victoria had to, of all things, die on him? Why were his friends Jeremiah’s friends, when the boy had no discernible features aside from this frustration and, admittedly, a comedic timing on stage that made Mako want to vomit with jealousy from time to time? And why was Jeremiah looking at him at that moment, their eyes locked across the fuzzy threshold between on- and offstage?

“What are you looking at?” Jeremiah asked, breaking the scene.

“Who?” Blaise’s voice came calling from the front row of the auditorium. “Mako, Tate, get down here and sit with me. You’re all making me antsy.”

Mako tore his eyes from Jeremiah’s to follow Blaise’s command, trailing Tatum out onto the apron of the stage and climbing down off it to sit at Blaise’s right with his hands anxiously clasped in his lap. Jeremiah was still looking at him. He was looking back. Tatum was offering him a stick of spearmint gum. He was taking it, cramming it into his mouth, and chewing hard – popping it.

“Quit that,” Blaise said.

He did, but only because he’d been asked to.

Jeremiah – the only member of the cast with a car – would drive them all home following each afterschool rehearsal. Amidst the stuttering, sharp mechanical coughing of his engine as he’d twist his keys in the ignition once, twice – biting his bottom lip on the third turn with a muttered, “Come on, dammit. I know you can start.” – Tatum would wax poetical about his endless virtue as a mate, squished between Mako and Loren in the backseat and reciting off-the-cuff limericks with her feet kicked up onto the central armrest.

“There once was a guy named Jem,

Who was the most wonderful friend.

So we would not roam,

He’d drive us all home.

My love, I need not pretend.”

“Weak content,” Quick would snort from the front passenger seat.

“Oh, come on,” Loren would protest, letting her curls down and waving at Blaise as he walked to his own car across the parking lot. “It’s a limerick. The content is the least important part.”

“ _ Jem _ doesn’t rhyme with  _ friend _ , man.” Quick would have twisted sideways in his seat by then, putting himself face-to-face with a scrunched, scowling Tatum. “So not only is your content shit, your form is also lacking.”

“I can kick you in the face, you know,” Tatum would threaten, raising her stocking-clad right leg several inches into the air for emphasis.

Then Jeremiah would have finally roused the engine of his ancient Volkswagen Rabbit to life, and he would have breathed, “ _ Christ _ ,” beneath the warring voices of Tatum, Quick, and Loren in an undertone only Mako would have heard because only Mako would have been checked enough out of the argument to hear it, and the two of them would have locked eyes in the rearview mirror. Accidentally, of course, but then they wouldn’t have looked away. Two seemingly endless seconds would have passed and they’d have stayed staring at each other, none of their friends noticing in their overriding preoccupation with rhyme and poetry and other such bullshit. Then Mako would have cut his eyes sideways out of the window, and Jeremiah would have hit the gas hard backing out of his parking space, and the air in the car would have crackled, oily and hot, until it very nearly popped from the pressure of their shared presence, their looking – only ever fizzling out when Mako stepped out of the car at 50 Salamanca without so much as a thank you delivered over his shoulder. This happened almost every weekday afternoon.

At night, struggling for sleep in the way he often did in the wake of Nana Victoria’s death, Mako would find the rearview window hanging suspended and stringless in the air above his bed, within it sitting Jeremiah’s vitreous hazel eyes. He would hiss with irritation at the horrific cliché of this, throw his arm up over his face and pretend his world was all black and all nothing. There accompanied this looking of theirs no pinned butterfly feeling, not even uncomfortable squirming at the sheer thing of being observed. Mostly, there was just the desire to prolong the eye contact for as long as both of them dared to, and it was all about daring, really. It was all about wonder.

Loren, in the windy air between the end of school and the start of rehearsal, used to hug them both so tightly that the single degree of separation between them simply embracing each other seemed obsolete. She, their mother bird, would plop slivers of fried eggplant directly into their mouths at lunch. She watched them with an affectionate intensity that did so much to muddy the waters between them, and Mako could have loved Jeremiah so much through the lens of Loren, of Tatum – who shared the gentle, inconsequential material of Jeremiah’s life with Mako on the phone in the evenings, good-naturedly gossiping about his mother, the Jewish Pākehā artist from Masterton, and Jeremiah’s legendary comic book collection that he’d shared only with their friend group – and of Quick – who referred without shame to Jeremiah as his best friend, his favorite person, his mate for life, his boo thang. Mako preferred a clear-eyed existence, however, so he didn’t love Jeremiah at all. He just denied wishing that he could.

When Blaise’s blocking required them to stand close together or – God forbid it even be imagined – touch each other, the hot oiliness from the car would accumulate in the air with newfound fervor and the anxiety aroused from merely looking at each other would spike into unbearable territories. This is where the insults began, where they began to mutter ugly things to each other out of Blaise’s earshot – “Not so rough, asshole,” and “You touch me, and I’ll send you off the stage, mate.” When normal rehearsals eventually gave way to dress rehearsals in the beginning of October and they’d be compelled to change into their costumes backstage before the afternoon’s work began, even accidentally touching each other’s clothes became cause for alarm – “Shit, man, don’t drop my shit,” when Jeremiah would shove Mako’s horned and hairy Beast mask out of the way to access his plaid button-down; a series of dirty looks when Mako kicked his boots off anywhere in the vicinity of Jeremiah’s New Balances. Being sent off from the auditorium to the theatre classroom across campus to retrieve some extraneous yet vital thing Blaise had forgotten to retrieve after the dismissal bell – the man’s vodka thermos or the stage diagram or the prop bin they’d only just begun to choose things from for the show – Mako would trail a yard or so behind Jeremiah and Quick as they trudged along the flat swaths of green grass beneath the late afternoon sun, listening to their chatter and feeling the way he imagined Jeremiah might have felt when he’d shown up and stolen all of his friends away: far. Far as in far away from Raukokore and every familiar human he might have reached out to at that moment, to tell a joke or just say “hi” to. Far as in his inner walls stretched farther away from one another than they otherwise would have under normal circumstances. Far as in he only felt comfortable walking with the other boys’ backs to him, where he could gaze upon them from afar. 

He wished he could fling sharp metal things into the giving skin of Jeremiah’s back. 

He wished that at night he wouldn’t think about Jeremiah’s back as he thought about the boy’s eyes, knowing that the wishing would simply make the opposite come true. 

He wished he could tread upon Jeremiah’s back, and there was a part of Mako that hated and feared this newborn viciousness within himself; he’d never felt anything like it back in Raukokore, not even toward the awful Short twins who regularly sent his eyeballs careening up toward the sky and his feet walking all the way home from school out of a desire to not ride the bus with them and their infantile stupidity.

“What’s going on with you and Jem, bro?” Tatum asked him on the phone in the third week of October, over a whole month after their initial telephonic exchange about the very same subject. Earlier that day she’d asked Mako to braid her hair into one long plait in the middle of her head, having heard over the phone the previous night about his talent at doing it from Mum, and the sense memory of this slipped over Mako’s fingers like water, just listening to her talk to him, even about a topic he didn’t particularly enjoy. The girl cleared her throat – a soft explosion of sound when delivered right into Mako’s ear – then added, “This morning Quick told me and Loren you guys almost got in a fight yesterday. I thought you would definitely be friends by now.”

Mako cast his gaze into the kitchen, where Mum stood at the stove turning lamb skewers over onto their uncooked sides. He fiddled with the telephone’s spiral cord, leaned against the wall next to its cradle, and said in his most helpless and fiercely unapologetic tone of voice – because no, as much as he was suffering with this phantom-in-the-night-eye-blinking, heart-so-big-and-full-and-stinking, feeling-for-the-first-time-in-his-life-like-the-most-awful-and-bitchy-person-on-the-face-of-the-Earth conundrum, he wasn’t sorry, thank you very much, that “We just don’t mesh.”

Tatum made a huffing noise. “Maybe you don’t  _ want _ to mesh.” And perhaps she was right.

**Do you remember the day we actually had our first conversation with each other?**

**I love the way you say that, like it was a good day. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, you had a light in your eyes I’d never seen before–**

**See, it’s amazing we’re actually still friends with each other–**

**I think we’re more than friends, Mako–**

**Because you’re so damn mean to me! You’re so sarcastic and bitchy and ugh!**

**You’re worse than me! Not a day passes in our relationship where you don’t threaten me with bodily harm, divorce, infidelity, or some sick combination thereof.**

**I’m just passionate, baby. Full of passion. I’m a big old ball of crazy and you can’t handle it.**

**I** **_do_ ** **remember the day we talked for the first time. Cue the dramatic harp music.**

The day before Halloween and the premiere of  _ 70 Scenes _ , the plastic popcorn bowl prop split under the weight of Storm Turei and Katerina Walz after the two of them were caught fooling around backstage and, in their surprise at having been caught, fell ass- and hip-first into the prop bin, thus breaking possibly the single most important inanimate component of the play save for the television, which was thankfully too hulking and too sturdy to be in any danger of cracking in two. Blaise, after letting out a long, strangled animal noise that froze every other human presence within a twenty-foot radius in some expression of confusion, fear, and/or plain displeasure, collected the fragile bits of his pre-production director’s psyche and let his eyes whirl around the whole of the backstage area, searching for the perfect person to take his neurotic need for order out on.

“Where’s Mako and Jem? Are they still bitching each other out onstage?” Blaise turned to Loren, his near-perpetual shadow. “Go get them, love. Tell them I need them to run an errand for me.”

For the tension between them that was both palpable and incredibly distracting for all members of the production and the misfortune that was Jeremiah’s ownership of an actual four-wheeled vehicle, Mako and Jeremiah were given the punishing task of heading out to the Wisebuys on Dixon to procure a replacement popcorn bowl. 

“Do I have to go with him?” Mako asked without shame, indicating Jeremiah with a callous jerk of the thumb. “I mean, he’s the one with the car.”

“Mako’s right,” Jeremiah said, and Mako was given the small thrill of having his given name said for the very first time by the other boy (not that Jeremiah’s muttered, spat, and growled  _ jackass _ es and  _ asshole _ s didn’t do it for him, either). “I don’t need any help. I can be here and back on my own in like twenty minutes.”

Blaise shook his head, suddenly much crazier than usual around the eyes as he watched the dread set in on their pretty young faces. “This is a task for two, my theatre sons.” He clucked his tongue and nodded toward the auditorium’s side door. “Now get the fuck out of here. If you’re not talking civilly to each other by the time you get back, I’m replacing you with Quick and Esau. That’s a promise, not a threat.”

As they stalked side-by-side off out of the auditorium and toward the parking lot, not a word nor a look passed between them. As Jeremiah unlocked first his driver’s side door and then, from inside the cockpit, the passenger’s side, still they did not speak. It was only after Jeremiah managed to key his engine awake after a whopping five tries that the universe of words Mako had been snowballing like big angry nebulae inside him ever since Jeremiah Tui looked him out of his face and said, “ _ Wow _ ,” began to bubble up and out of him, starting with this: “Yo, what is your fucking problem, bro?”

Jeremiah reversed out of his parking space with a serenity and a collectedness that made Mako want to wring his neck until it broke. He pronounced, deliberately calm, “I don’t know what problem you’re referring to.”

“Oh my  _ God! _ ” Mako yelled this at the dashboard, which at the moment was more reactive than was the teenager sitting next to him. “Ever since I showed up here, you can’t even look me in the face. I didn’t even do anything to you, and you can’t even look at me! That’s what problem I’m referring to.”

“I don’t want to talk about this,” Jeremiah said, in a voice that was so soft, so pathetically exhausted that Mako might have backed off right then and there if he wasn’t so pissed and desperate for his continued position in the play.

“Tough!” he cried, breaking off into crazed laughter that had Jeremiah watching him sideways with a distinctly scared expression on his face and Mako himself wondering where this capacity for unsettling and insane behavior came from, when and how did he start talking and acting so much like his mother. “We  _ have _ to talk about this, because I’m not getting kicked out of this fucking play for you, bro. I’m not losing my friends for  _ you _ .”

“Okay, here’s the problem.” They were idling at the edge of the parking lot. The Rabbit’s engine was beginning to sputter ominously. Jeremiah’s right foot was flying off the gas as he released the steering wheel to raise his hands in a display of both defensiveness and insurmountable irritation. “They’re not your friends. They’re mine.”

“Uh, reality check – not mutually exclusive categories! I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m the one who’s been walking to school with them every morning for the past three months. I’m the one making everyone laugh at lunch. I’m sorry if that stick is so far up your arse you can’t have any fun anymore–”

“Why did you even show up?” Jeremiah was looking at him across the center console more directly than he had for the entirety of the time they’d known each other, their faces a mere foot apart, the air and the words between them well over room temperature. “Why did you even come here and fuck everything up, eh? Why couldn’t you have just stayed where you were instead of infiltrating my life and my space?”

“I’m sorry!” Mako meant it. “I’m sorry my Nan died and I had to move to this city, which I fucking  _ hate _ , by the way! I’m sorry I’m like, too cool, or whatever it is you think I am! I’d rather be dead in Raukokore than fucking up your life here! I’m sorry.”

With that, the Rabbit’s engine produced a clattering death rattle, then cut out. Jeremiah’s face – moments ago bright red with anger – suddenly went slack as both his car’s demise and Mako’s words sank in. Without speaking, the boys climbed out of the car and began to walk northeast on Taranaki Street toward the Wisebuys. If Jeremiah noticed Mako’s sniffling or the way he’d occasionally grind the heel of his palm into his eye, the boy did not show it.

**I was so in love with you.**

**You were?**

**You were just… hurting so bad. And it was apparent from the moment you walked into Blaise’s class, talking about how you wanted to die and how your family was broken and all that. Everyone thought it was funny, that you were joking, but I didn’t. I was so in love with you, I didn’t know what to do with myself.**

**So** **_you_ ** **were the one pulling pigtails. What does it say about you that you loved me because I was suicidal and hurting?**

**I don’t know. I really don’t know.**

**Give me a kiss, you egg.**

The bowl they selected was not identical to its broken predecessor, but it would do. A neon red thing with black spiderweb silhouettes factory-printed all over the outside. Jeremiah paid for the $2.99 bowl with a five-dollar note and spent the change on a couple of Moro bars, one of which he handed off to Mako on their way out of the store. Five minutes into the twenty-minute walk back to Wellington High, he glanced at Mako sucking melted chocolate off his fingertips and uttered, after a long time of not having said anything at all, “I didn’t mean what I said.”

“No, you did,” Mako replied without even thinking about it. Then, once he had thought about it some: “You did, don’t take it back. I’m glad you finally said something.”

Jeremiah nervously swung the plastic bag carrying the bowl in his right hand, the one not between his body and Mako’s. He seemed, weirdly enough, scared to look straight at Mako again, but this time for an entirely different reason, one Mako was less anxious to contemplate. “It was…  _ really _ mean, though.”

“So?” Mako waited until Jeremiah met his gaze, until the boy was brave enough to take in the puffiness around his eyes and the unflinching seriousness painted across his face. “At least you talked to me. That’s all I really wanted.”

Jeremiah’s expression turned incredulous. “That’s not all you wanted.”

“Well, yeah, I also wanted you to punch me in the face so I could totally wallop your arse, but I’m going to act like those thoughts never existed because they’re not very useful, now are they?” 

A smile began to play on Jeremiah’s lips – the first one Mako had ever seen that wasn’t an affectation for the stage. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Mako was brought back to his own apology from earlier, and his heart sank – a descent brought on by sheer emotional gravity more than mere sorrow. He wanted to take Jeremiah’s hand in his, to lie together in the middle of the street like he used to with Tina Turner when he was ten years old and the Raukokore roadways were vacant and dusty – nothing like the busyness of Wellington, nothing even close to this volume of cars and people and structures. Instead, he reached over to take the crumpled and empty Moro wrapper out of Jeremiah’s left hand and pocket it, and he said, “I’m sorry, too,” and just like before, he meant it in every way it could have been meant. Their confessions hung between them like flat, moss-covered stones. 

_ 70 Scenes of Halloween _ , directed by Blaise Peltier and starring Jeremiah Tui and Loren Atwood, opened on Thursday, October 31, 2003 to the acclaim of the Wellington High School community, who valued more than most other secondary schools their performance arts programs and the students within them. Exiting the auditorium afterward with a head full of sweaty, mussed hair and a heart full of the nervous energy that accompanied stagecraft, Mako was almost immediately swept up into Robbie’s freckled spaghetti noodle arms, lifting him up into the warm October air and twirling him around in a tight, loving circle as the man all but screamed in his ear, “Ohmygod you are soweirdandamazing! My little brother! A thespian, a demon, a beast!”

“Can I please put that on my resumé?” Mako asked, struggling to get the words out through the laughter that naturally came in response to any of Robbie’s overwrought public displays of affection, the way he was at that moment pressing his fingers into his face damp with perspiration and raking those same fingers through every dark tangle in his hair.

“You must credit me, of course, but yes.” Robbie had a way of grinning so big the whole world disappeared into the folds of his face. He wrapped his arms around Mako a second time and made the boy rock with him, side to side until every overworked muscle felt like jelly; he said, “That might have been the strangest, most wonderful thing I’ve ever seen. Tell me why Blaise didn’t stage shit like this when  _ I  _ was a student.”

“He knew you’d make it too good,” Mako murmured into the warm skin of Robbie’s neck. He just about yelled with glee when Robbie nuzzled his crown in response. 

That was the moment at which Tatum and Jeremiah came giggling out of the auditorium, looking just as happy and sweaty and tired as Mako. They stopped short, seeing the spectacle of the Gehringer brothers cuddling and making their weird purring animal noises at each other, and it belatedly occurred to Mako, once he noticed his co-stars, to introduce them to Robbie, who was already beginning to leer curiously at them.

“You guys, this is my brother, Robbie,” he said, breathless. “The one Blaise is always talking about.”

“ _ Oh _ , so I’m  _ famous _ , am I?” Robbie asked this in his crooning gay movie star voice, the one that, in the early 2000s, had the effect of killing Mako with hardly suppressed laughter.

Tatum grinned. “Oh, yeah. We’ve heard all about you.”

“Well, tell me, tell me!” Robbie shook Mako with the arm still wound tightly around his middle, ignoring the way the boy was just barely holding himself together in both his amusement and his fatigue. “Who are these cuties? I know you were our main man.” – he gave Jeremiah a quick nod – “but I didn’t see you up on stage.”

“This is Tatum,” Mako said, smiling affectionate and enamored when Tatum mock-curtsied for emphasis. “She was the witch with the purple hair and the crazy green mask.”

“ _ Enchanté _ ,” Robbie intoned. He took Tatum’s hand to smack a kiss upon its top side. “You were divine.”

“And this is Jem.” Mako and Jeremiah – no, Jem – exchanged equally shocked looks at this inaugural use of a diminutive, this nascent familiarity. Their shared amazement increased substantially when Mako said, half actually meaning it and half just wishing it could be true, “These are my  _ friends _ .” Plural.

Robbie, always a social strategist, settled for a cordial, non-threatening handshake with Jem. “Nice to meet you both. I know baby bro’s been having a hard time getting used to living in Wellington–”

“Please shut up.”

“– but I have no doubt you guys have been easing the pain. Thank you for that.”

Tatum was smiling with all of her teeth, then, clearly delighted by Robbie and by Mako and by the pure and genuine intimacy that existed between all of them in that moment. Jem’s expression was much more subdued, but just as Tatum had been, he was doing a foxtrot in his eyes. The four of them stood there just outside the auditorium for minutes that stretched on into the twenties that evening, Tatum and Robbie dominating a conversation that ran the gamut from Britney Spears to Mako’s silly childhood idiosyncrasies, while Mako and Jem stood by and just listened, floated, and fell for the everythingness of it all, the everythingness of the night, the everythingness of talking and breathing and simply sharing one another’s presence, how magical it suddenly seemed to be. So this was making friends and falling in love. Boy, was it stupid.

**I always love the story of how we met. It’s so stupid.**

**It’s so wonderful.**

#    
  
  
  
  



	7. 07

#  _ 7 _

Mako is at work and on his lunch break when his cell starts to vibrate, close enough to the far left corner of his desk that it threatens to wiggle right off and tumble to the floor. Dropping his plastic fork into the clear blue Tupperware dish containing his Caesar salad, its tines already halfway through a cluster of pepperoncini and romaine, he takes a moment to see who exactly is calling him before he answers.  _ rui ngata _ the screen says; he slides his thumb along the screen to pick up.

“What’s up, Mum?”

“Are you busy?” This is almost always the first thing that comes out of her mouth every time he answers her call. He’d anticipated it before he’d even heard her slightly distorted phone voice.

“No, I’m eating lunch.” There is a dull, clattering noise over the line that raises the vigilant hairs on the back of Mako’s neck. “What are you doing?”

“Well, you know how last week you said the walls in your study were too puce?” Mum’s voice is bright and terrifying, full of all the telltale octaves of hypomania or perhaps even full-blown mania. “I was at the Home Depot this morning and I saw the most beautiful shade of–”

“Please tell me you’re not repainting my office.” Mako raises his head to offer a nod of acknowledgment to Annie, who is entering the room with her daily bowl of clam chowder. “I will actually pay you not to repaint my office.”

“I didn’t do anything yet, egg! I just felt like doing something around the house today, making myself useful in the ways that I can.”

This was to be expected. Every month at around this time exactly, Mum – in lieu of catching her long-gone period – gets caught up in some domestic project to which she can devote all of her mental and physical energies. Last month it was pressure washing the house. The month before that, she resowed her entire garden, replacing her beloved tomatoes and squash with year-round flowering plants such as Chinese hibiscus and sweet alyssum. Despite having retired shortly before the move to the Crescent City nearly a decade ago, she’s never quite let go of all of the type A, workaholic habits that kept her endlessly busy as a professor of biology and a research scientist in New Zealand; this time, however, instead of occupying her time with marine life, she is the tireless warden of her own domicile, on top of every last nook and cranny there is to be attended to.

Mako twists a clump of lettuce around his fork. “You know, you could also just. Take the day to relax? Watch a movie? Read that book you’ve been loving so much?”

“I finished that book four days ago, where have you been?” Mum emits a noise that sounds, hilariously enough, like the frustrated groaning of a child – only made unchildish by its utterance from her, his mother’s, mouth. “I’m bored, Mako! I know you, you’re like a cat – all you want to do is lie around and nap – but I’m not like that, I’ve got to do things with myself. I feel like I’m going insane in here!”

Consciously choosing not to be offended by the piercing accuracy of her statement – the piercing accuracy of pretty much every statement she makes, to be honest – Mako slowly munches on his salad and asks, “What do you want to do, besides repaint my office?”

“Reorganize the closets.”

Mako  _ hm _ s, thoughtful. “Veto.”

“Reorganize the kitchen.”

“Veto.”

“Rearrange the living room.”

“Yikes, no. Veto.”

“Build a gazebo in the courtyard.”

“ _ Super _ veto.”

“Alphabetize your books.”

“Veto.”

“You’re not giving me a whole lot of space.” Mum’s voice is at its most motherly now – its husky, gentle cadence a clean and cool hand caressing his inner ear. “You’re lucky – you’re in your thirties, you have a job, you’re doing things all day long. I don’t have that anymore, and you’re not letting me try to get it back.”

Mako is almost too chastened to reply. “I don’t even get why you’d want it back.”

“You getting it doesn’t matter, now does it?” Mum says. It doesn’t.

For a moment, Mako lets himself imagine what his mother does at home while he, Jem, and Kory are all absent. Teaches herself Portuguese from a book so she can speak with the woman two doors down about the small garden in her front yard. Swiffers the floors and vacuums the rugs the whole house over at least once, twice if Stevie begins to rip the carpet out of her scratching post again. Fertilizes and mulches and waters the hibiscus plants and the sweet alyssum and the bromeliads and the azaleas with a manic intensity that occasionally verges on scary even by Mum standards – she, the woman who once spearheaded the beneficial reorganization of decades’ worth of records and files within the biology department at Victoria U in Wellington; who lost countless hours of sleep proving the existence of a heretofore undiscovered, nearly microscopic fish in the Bay of Plenty in 1997; who used to drive to work at 5:00 AM and come back home twelve hours later still wide fucking awake, ready to help Nana Victoria bring the sheep down from the hills that bordered their farmhouse – this very same woman. Switches laundry from the washer to the dryer. Irons the clothes. Tolerates the stains that refuse to come out, because the only other option is to take leave of the senses that had stubbornly taken hold within her a long time ago. Makes the beds despite Mako’s stubborn insistence that he doesn’t care for his room’s especial neatness (he does). Shakes the dust out of every curtain in the house and then wipes said dust up after it accumulates on the floor with a dishcloth she sweeps along with her slippered foot. Rinses the toothpaste her child and grandchild see fit to leave in the upstairs bathroom’s sink in their rush to get out of the house in the morning. Watches the latest episode of whateverthefuck on Hulu until she gets good and antsy enough to look for something else to do. Cuts out pads of steel wool to use on the most stubborn of food grime. Clears every expired or soon-to-be expired foodstuff out of the back of the refrigerator. Picks with tweezers the lint off her favorite armchair and deposits it in the rubbish bin by the front door. Waits for the rest of the family to come home – in the castle she keeps and feels no shame in bragging about, because she’s paying out of her retirement fund for it, because it is her late-life baby. She’s raising it better than she did Mako.

Mako makes a noise of resignation somewhere in the back of his throat. He says, “Do whatever you want. I retract every veto.” When he gets home, the entire living room has been rearranged according to feng shui principles – the wine-colored rug relocated from the center of the room to its southernmost corner, the ficus taken all the way out of the dining room and placed beside the couch along the eastern wall – and half of the books in his study have been stacked carefully on the floor in piles of  _ L _ -titles,  _ M _ -titles,  _ N _ -titles, and so on until the one very short stack of  _ Z _ -titles. 

Mum smiles up at him from where she sits cross-legged on the floor, alphabetizing the stack of  _ R _ -titles. “You said you retracted every veto, remember? Were you just trying to get me off the phone?”

This couldn’t be farther from the truth, but still Mako murmurs, “You know it,” bending at the waist to drop a kiss on the top of Mum’s crazy ponytailed head. To himself, he remarks, “ _ Definitely _ a full manic up-do,” and when Mum shoots him a questioning look over her shoulder, he simply lets himself out of the room and goes to find something fruity to drink, praying she didn’t throw it into the rubbish in the midst of her cleaning frenzy.

He thinks about that fish.

They’d named it  _ Squaloliparis tangaroa _ . Mum had insisted on naming it after their ancient god of the sea, despite the irony of its infinitesimal size and her coworkers’ attempts to convince her to remain firmly in line with the ICZN’s guidelines, which heavily stressed the requirement of a wholly Latinate moniker. Mako was ten years old when she found, christened, and unveiled her  _ Squaloliparis tangaroa _ to the world, and while this should have been exciting – the discovery of an as of yet unknown species and the subsequent sharing of that discovery with everybody, ever – the day-to-day happenings of it all, from Mako’s perspective, were all so boring so as to practically slip out of his mind forever, had he not been reminded over the years by Mum’s own sanctimonious harping on about it in the face of any threatened disrespect – “Was it not  _ I _ ,” she would say, “Rui Whetu Ngata, who discovered and named  _ Squaloliparis tangaroa _ in April 1997? Was that not  _ me? _ ” Today, when Mako thinks about  _ Squaloliparis tangaroa _ , he thinks about the Saturday morning that Mum brought him to work with her, the way she used to when he was much younger than ten and much crazier about the prospect of being the one attached at all times to her hip, how much and how shamelessly he loved her in those days. He had been roiling nauseous that morning, and Nana Victoria had been off spending the weekend in Auckland for a  _ tangi _ . Mum had yelled expletive-laced entreaties at him from the porch until he’d come stomping on out of his bedroom – clad in his pajamas, curls wild and teeth unbrushed, the picture of stubborn autistic rebellion and simply not having it – and he’d convinced himself both then and now that she’d only been able to shove him into the passenger seat of her old Mazda because he’d let her, not because he’d been verbally beaten nearly to death and broken down by her godlike force of will.

“You are  _ not _ sitting up in that goddamn house all by yourself while you’re sick, you little asshole,” she’d grumbled at him from the driver’s seat, gripping the steering wheel so tightly that her brown knuckles had gone Pākehā pale. Reaching over to open the glove compartment and retrieve a pack of Mentos, which she then coldly tossed into Mako’s lap, she’d snapped, “Have a mint. I won’t have my coworkers thinking my son just doesn’t brush his teeth.”

He crammed two Mentos into his mouth and ground them between his molars until they tasted like flavorless rubber. Mum plugged  _ Abandoned Luncheonette _ into the tape deck and screwed the volume up to nearly maximum.

The drive to Tauranga, where Mum’s office was located, was three hours west along Highway 35. For the first hour, Mako and Rui had occupied themselves with the sights afforded to them just outside their windows of interest – Rui with her eyes firmly on the gray ribbon that stretched endlessly out in front of her, Mako lost somewhere in the hills and the grass, shrubs, and blustery trees upon them that formed a verdant wall on his side of the road. He’d always enjoyed the ride back to Raukokore better than the ride from it – both because he was coming home and because his side of the car would be exposed to the Bay of Plenty and the sea it opened its great green-blue mouth to as they drove along the northern perimeter of the North Island, to the odd farmhouse and settlement situated right along the side of the highway.

After the second conclusion of  _ Abandoned Luncheonette _ , Mum had ejected the album from the tape deck and asked Mako, “What do you want to listen to?”

Mako, still sort of sore around the heart, had replied in a grumpy little undertone. “I don’t really care.” He did care. He wanted  _ Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy _ .

Mum had sighed in that impatient, angry way that made Mako want to crawl beneath his seat and maybe die there. “You’re killing me, Mako,” she’d said, and blindly rifled through the compartment beneath her armrest for fresh music. “I’m actually being killed by you.”

Hall and Oates had then given way to Van Morrison. Mum’s tastes in music always ran toward the soft rock favored by her own mother; Mako wasn’t all that surprised or displeased by the sunny introduction to “Brown Eyed Girl” suddenly booming through the car’s tinny speakers. He’d expected her to stop talking, then, to surrender once more to the prickly silence that had sat in the space between them for a whole sixty-three minutes at that point, but  _ no _ – that stage had passed. They’d reached phase two of Mum’s anger: the talkative phase.

“Here I am, trying to make this whole ordeal a little more bearable for you, and do you help me? No. Do you play along? Of course not. I hate to pull this card – I really do, and I just  _ know _ you’re going to commit this morning of all mornings to memory so that you can lord it over me one day and call me a bad mother, watch you become some Freudian psychiatrist and blame  _ everything _ on me – but you know what? You remind me of your father when you get like this. Yeah, I said it. He used to stonewall me like  _ crazy _ . And I expect that kind of shit-headed behavior from you – you’re just a stupid piece of shit kid, you don’t know any better. You don’t know how  _ disrespectful _ and  _ unbearable _ you’re being for me – and what should I say, huh? It’s not like I’m working my goddamn ass off for you, three hours from home, five fucking days a week. It’s not like I’ve given up the whole life I had in Wellington for you, so that you wouldn’t have to grow up with parents who couldn’t fucking stand each other. It’s not like my whole goddamn  _ life _ is about  _ you _ , Mako – since before you were even born, it’s been all about you. Maybe I should change that. Maybe I need to start doing for  _ me _ again. Mum would never let me hear the end of it, but who gives a shit, right? I just turned forty-nine. I’ve got at least thirty more good years before this all starts going down the drain. I’m going to start living my  _ own _ life again, fuck what anyone else says.”

The truth was, Mum had been living her own life for years. She’d had a thriving career hours away from home, possessed a social life of optimal size in her estimation, and had moved herself and her child back to her hometown for reasons more heavily related to her own emotional health and wellbeing than Mako’s. Of course, Mako hadn’t known this at the time – he was only ten. All he’d known was that he was the iron ball shackled to his mother’s restless feet, and that the fact of this somehow made him want a fresh Mento, so he shook one out of the cylindrical paper wrapper.

“You better not eat all of those,” Mum had said. “Here.” – she swung her open palm across the center console – “Give me one.”

Mako had watched her pop the ovular mint into her mouth and break its thin, semi-hard shell with a soft  _ crunch _ . She hadn’t looked at him directly – hadn’t shifted her gaze away from the road at all, in fact – but he’d been able to tell from her profile alone that she was losing steam in the wake of her monologue, that she’d likely start verbally roaming on to other topics – which she had.

She’d talked at Mako about her coworker-cum-best friend Madalynn, who’d recently announced her pregnancy and decided not to learn the sex of the baby until its birth. Mum had thought this was a foolish idea; she’d also, in the slightly hypocritical way that was both infuriating and understandable because it was hers, thought it was foolish for Madalynn to have gotten pregnant outside of marriage, not because she thought it improper or anything but because raising a child without guaranteed help was so difficult, in her humble, experience-informed opinion. She’d talked at Mako about the family friend to whose  _ tangi _ Nana Victoria had left for – a man who she herself had only met once or twice when she was a teenager, who made the Chinese-style stringed instruments they kept in the living room, the ones Nana Victoria had promised to teach Mako how to play once they were done learning guitar together. She’d talked at Mako about the grocery list she’d been trying to make the night before, how she’d wanted to try her hand at the mirlitons stuffing Nana had always been so good at making and had, in turn, always neglected to share the secrets of her recipe for. She’d talked until Mako’s head had swum with words, with pictures, with things he hadn’t quite understood and with things he had. All the while the sun, which had been low in the sky when they’d left the Raukokore farmhouse, ascended upon its invisible celestial ladder until the heavens turned from a royal indigo to the brilliant, pale blue of true daylight – bright enough for Mako to actually study every hill and tree they zipped past on their path down the highway.

Thirty minutes from Tauranga, Mum had said, “We have a new fish in the office.”

This had piqued Mako’s interest. “You do?” he’d asked.

Mum, satisfied at finally having gotten him to forget enough about his crankiness to speak, had smiled at the windshield. “We do.”

The fish had been Mako’s brethren from the beginning. As far as he’s concerned today, he was one of his mother’s fish, one she’d carried within her; whose morphology she’d studied over time, his long bony fins and the line of his dorsal side; whose coloring she’d described as “tawny” and “sunkissed” and “beautiful” when he’d run around the yard shirtless with the sheep; who she’d been intermittently fascinated with over the years, touching his hair and kissing him goodnight. Listening to the way she’d talk about her fish when she’d come home, seeing her in action with her fish at work, he’d known his place in her family tree. He was one of hundreds if not thousands of children, the single blood relative but no more or less special than the rest.

He doesn’t know how this ever made him feel.

Mum had told him his new sibling’s name: “I’ve decided to call it  _ Squaloliparis tangaroa _ .” Argle-gargle gobbledygook. “It’s very tiny, and it’s never been seen before.”

That morning, in the Tauranga Center for Marine Sciences, Mako had been permitted by his mother to dip his slim, minimally callused hand into the tank that contained  _ Squaloliparis tangaroa _ and touch the fish, which was no larger than the length of his pinkie’s fingernail, had a poppy seed for an eye on each side of its head, and shone like a single golden sequin when the light hit it just right. He’d just barely detected the tickling sensation that told him he’d made contact, which had ended just as soon as it had begun. He’d asked Mum if he could give the fish “a real name” – his words – and she, passing out of the laboratory to make the short walk back to her office, had replied, “Knock yourself out.”

He’d named it Goldilocks, not even knowing its true gender, because that was the only thing he could think of at the time. Then he’d thrown up on his shoes and spent the rest of the day napping on the floor beneath Mum’s desk, his back being rubbed in wide circles by her bare foot and his head, wooly like hers, filled with the sounds of her typing.

Mako thinks about that fish and that morning while sipping straight from the sixty-four-ounce bottle of Cran•Mango juice and pacing aimlessly around the kitchen. He feels suddenly, profoundly alone in his own house; the feeling washes over him without warning and without reason, coats his insides with saltwater and other unidentified transparent fluids. He is nearly overtaken by the urge to return to his study and get down on the floor with Mum – not to help her, but simply to sit with her the way he used to whenever such infiltratory, alien feelings reared their bug-eyed heads within him – but then he thinks about the fourteen year-old taking a shower upstairs and the vaguely sparkly career he’s over eight full years into and his whole adult life as it has been lived without the omnipresence of his mother, so he caps the Cran•Mango, leaves the spotless kitchen, and goes to sit in his living room shuffled anew, alone.

“Have you decided what you want to do for dinner yet?” Mum calls to him from inside his office, him having passed the open doorway on the way into the living room.

Mako closes his eyes and leans into the dip in the center of the sofa, alone. “I still need to talk to Jem about it.”

“Well, maybe you should give him a call. I don’t remember what time he gets off work today. It’s Wednesday, right?”

Mako fishes his phone out of his pocket and opens iMessage, alone. “It is.”

“I couldn’t deal with his type of schedule. Always running around all over the place at the drop of any hat. I need more structure than that.” Mum produces a noise that is half laughing, half sighing. “That’s bipolar for you.” 

Mako types out a text message and sends it off to his partner, alone. “I hear you.”

They end up eating that salmon from earlier with a Mediterranean salad.

That night, lying beside Jem, listening to the little puffs of oinky, piggy air that escape him with insanely comforting regularity, Mako checks his email app after it becomes apparent that he will not go to sleep easily this night, that a rocky, meandering road and at least thirty percent of his smartphone’s battery is what it’s going to take. After a full three minutes of deleting junk sent to him from various social justice websites and online retailers itching to sell him his third, fourth, and fifth pair of hard candy-colored sunglasses, he finds a three day old missive from his father, subject line:  _ Hope you are well _ .

#    
  


**FROM:** _Ezra Gehringer <ezragehringer47@gmail.com>  
_ **TO:** _Mako Gehringer <kiwishark86@gmail.com>  
_ **SUBJECT:** _Hope you are well_

Mako -- 

Good morning from New Zealand. I believe it is afternoon where you are. I am writing to inquire as to your general status and wellbeing: how are you? I trust that all is well on the business front. Furthermore, how is Kora Mae? She is on the cusp of secondary school, is she not? Give her my love, please. I do miss her dearly.

I must also ask you about your brother. An embarrassing query, of course, considering your distance from our great island and my continued existence on it. I have not heard from Robin in nearly two months now. I am under the impression that your relationship with him is still thriving, and so I would ask you to check on him and get back to me A S A P. Thank you.

There is a funeral home being built across the street from my house. The noise in the morning is nearly unbearable. Every day I am woken up by the cacophony of construction work and the vulgarity of the workers. I will not complain, however, for fear of wasting my time and the time of others. I mainly wonder about how the neighborhood will change with so many mourners and funeral parties passing through at all times. I will keep you posted.

Again, I hope you are doing well. Please write back soon.

\-- Dad.

#    
  


Mako hovers his left thumb over the  _ Reply _ button for four seconds before deciding he’d rather wring a stilted, semi-forced reply out of his brains in the morning. He opens up his iMessage thread with Robbie and shoots off a series of texts in their direction, figuring he can be useful in some way tonight. 

#    
  


**Today** 12:37 AM

**mako gehringer  
** ezra emailed me three days ago asking about you. this is my attempt to ascertain whether or not you are alive.

CALL OUR FATHER

also fr are you okay? i haven’t heard from you in a minute

#    
  


He lies with his phone tucked beneath his pillow until the bed around him begins to go dark and warm. Robbie and Dad sit somewhere near the upstage of his mind, drinking tea and not speaking to each other. Mako is on the edge of getting good and lost in the rhythm of Jem’s snoring when his phone, as he’d been anticipating, vibrates directly beneath his ear, jolting him right back into his awake-and-kind-of-pissed-off-about-it state.

#    
  


**robbie gehringer  
** Im fine baby boy lol bout to go to dinner :o)

Arent u supposed to be in bed?

**mako gehringer  
** the family condition (insomnia) is causing me pains

i’m serious though you need to call ezra before he implodes. i really couldn’t even believe my eyes reading my email. why would he be asking ME about YOU when I’M IN NEW ORLEANS??

**robbie gehringer  
** Dont lecture me boy! Im not really responsible for him now am I? If he wants to know how im doing he can get in touch with me himself

Ill call him tho haha dont get your panties twisted. ;) Get some sleep baby boy. Kiss ya daughter for me

#    
  


Mako wrestles with the tone of his response for over a minute and a half, caught somewhere in the space between wanting to be appeasing and wanting to be self-righteous and annoyed. Because it requires less energy and he’s never really enjoyed talking down to his older sibling, he ends up going with the former.

#    
  


**mako gehringer  
** goodnight. eat well!

#    
  


In the morning, after only five hours of difficult, restless sleep, he presses his lips to Kory’s forehead and tells her, as she shovels Corn Pops and milk into her lipglossed mouth, “Robbie wanted me to kiss you for them. Granddad sends his love.”

Kory gives him that smile of hers that looks like it could come straight out of Disney movie, with the apples of her cheeks fuller than ever and her eyes glossy hazel beads that he could rub in his hands and catch way auspicious vibes from. Around a mouthful of cereal, she says, “That’s so sweet of them.”

“You know you’re like the only teenager in the world that receives long-distance love and is genuinely touched by it.” Mako stops watching his coffee drip to narrow his eyes at Kory. “What, are you an alien?”

“Just a good girl!” Kory chirps.

Mako suddenly, desperately wants to kiss her again – because of her goodness, because of her girlness. Too lazy to cross into the dining room again, he starts to simply pucker his lips in her direction, then thinks better of it and actually goes to kiss the top of her head – just above her ponytail, where she will feel the gentle pressure of it against her scalp.

“I love you,” he murmurs.

“You’re weird,” Kory replies.

The night before, between the text sesh with Robbie and an episode during which Mako spent upwards of twenty minutes speaking nonsense about the romanticism of trains into Jem’s upper back until Jem reached around, grabbed him by the hip, and uttered in the most serenely loving of whispered tones, “Mako. Please. Go to sleep,” Mako dreamed of wandering around his parents’ old house on Mairangi Road in Wellington, three and a half feet tall and endowed with hands only large enough to grasp a small orange. It was night and he was six or perhaps seven, and for what seemed like an entire year’s length of time he crawled down the carpeted hallway and listened to the gestational sounds of the rest of the house: the occasional clanging noise that came from the kitchen, the television a constant screen of conversational blankness, his parents’ footsteps as they passed between the living room and the kitchen, sometimes a particularly noisy ute as it rolled past down the street outside. Once he reached the end of the hallway, where he was compelled by geography to cross over into either the living room, the dining room, or the bathroom, he rolled over onto his back with his arms and legs curled catlike up over his torso and hips and gazed at the rooms available to him from a bat’s perspective – the toilet in the unilluminated bathroom jutting down out of a white tile ceiling, all of the furniture hanging upside down as if held in place by invisible strings, Mummy and Daddy pacing about with extra-strength suction cups on their feet. They spoke to each other.

“ **Maybe you** cruimt dyga cusa desa uvv uv fung,” Mummy said. “ **I mean** , **I’m** hud vunlehk **you** , **but** **I** hajan kad du **see you** yhosuna.”

“ **You** **know** **I** **can’t** yvvunt **to do that** ,” Daddy replied.

“ **How is it** **that** **Mako** kadc suna uv **you than** **I do**?” Mummy asked. “ **Does that** syga cahca **to you** , **Ezra**?”

“ **If we’re** **talking about what** sygac cahca, gaabehk **my** fungmuyt luhcecdahd sygac cahca.” Daddy said this while padding out of the living room and into the kitchen, carrying a glass filled halfway with maroon fluid. “ **We** lyhhud vihldeuh fedruid **both of us** fungehk.”

“ **We can’t** vihldeuh fedr  **both of us** fungehk!” Mummy threw a hand into the air, then let it rest on the top of her head.”  **For God’s sake** ,  **Ez** ,  **when is** dra mycd desa fa yldiymmo dymgat **to each other** ?”

“ **We talked** drec ajahehk  **at dinner** .”

“ **We talked with Mako** .  **We talked at Mako** .  **We talked** drnuikr  **Mako** .  **When is the last time we** dymgat du aylr udran –  **just us** ?”

“ **I don’t care** du luhdasbmyda drec.” Daddy turned on the faucet. “ **The** yhcfan ec duu tabnaccehk.”

At this point, Mako began to disappear into the spiral of his childhood egocentrism, struggling to swallow down the totality of his guilt and the utter wrongness of his existence. Suddenly, the vertical inversion of all space was not the product of his particular viewpoint but a reflection of his insides, of his place in the household. He became rooted to the ground, stuck spine-first like Velcro to the carpet, and the words of his parents took on even stranger and more alien dimensions than they had before, sounding like all consonants, every sound the aural harshness of a  _ K _ or a  _ T _ .

“ **Oh my God** ,” Mummy said. “ **Mako, what are you doing there?** ”

Disoriented, Mako rolled instantly to his feet and ran three million steps back down the hallway, back into his room, back into his bed, which he sometimes had trouble climbing up into. At the moment in which he vanished fully beneath the covers – whole body gone, swallowed in cotton blend – Daddy appeared in the doorway, no longer carrying bloody fluids in his hands, silent for moments that stretched on for electric, terrifying years.

He said, “ **Mako, what are you doing up so late?** ”

Mako used to do this all the time, see. His primary nighttime activity, aside from the usual, expected sleep, was wandering around the house just looking at and listening to everything, dodging his parents’ awareness to the best of his early childhood abilities. He didn’t want Daddy to know this, however, so he remained a stone beneath the blankets, unmoving and unspeaking and simply absent in his invisibility. 

The muffled sound of footsteps reached him. The mattress dipped at his back. A hand came to rest momentarily upon his shoulder, then reached to tug at the blankets that concealed him, peeling them back to reveal his fetal, curled form. 

Daddy said, “ **I know you’re awake.** ” Then, in a tone of voice much less grave – which took effort, to be sure, as he always spoke with the utmost seriousness by default – “ **It’s okay. Are you okay?** ”

Mako wanted to answer – he wanted to answer so bad he could have split his own seams with the immensity of his desire, skin unzipping and ejecting pink and red guts outward – but then he was in the backseat, watching the lightstanders zip past outside the window. They shone orange-yellow against the early evening cerulean of the sky, over Indian food joints and surf shops and two-story flats. He used to be so entranced by the visual rhythm of these lightstanders, by their elongated lowercase  _ R _ shape, the way their stems shot far up into the air and dangled luminescent color overhead, the way they rapidly approached before disappearing behind and beyond his field of vision. Daddy drove the car. He played “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” on the tape deck as many times as Mako wanted him to, because he loved so much the  _ bluuuuuuues _ , the  _ rooooooooaaads _ , and the  _ aaaa-aaa-aaa-aaaaaah _ s. At home, he’d play it again with “Little Jeannie” and “Crocodile Rock” while they sat together in his office, Daddy hunched over his books and Mako cross-legged with his drawing paper on the floor, sketching the lightstanders and running the paper past his face over and over and over again until it was like in the car and the lightstanders were zipping in and out of his perception. Mako was always made to promise not to speak during this office time. If he broke this promise, he’d be reprimanded with a quickness – “ **What did you say you’d do for me?** ” Daddy would ask. “ **This is a nonverbal zone** .” After hours of this – hours of navel-gazing self-entertainment and light and Elton John records rotating on the gramophone – Daddy would set his tools down, scoop Mako’s sprawling brown monkey body up into his arms, and carry him out of the room and into the kitchen, saying, “Let’s find something to eat, shall we?”

Mako always felt as if he was one clumsy shift in weight away from falling right out of Daddy’s grasp. He made himself as prehensile as possible and said, “I want fruit,” or “I want pasta.”

“ **How about vegetables?** ” would be Daddy’s somber reply. “ **How about cereal?** ”

Mako ate baby carrots dipped in plain hummus and watched rugby on television with Daddy sitting beside him on the sofa, a novel cracked open on his lap and his glasses slipping down over the crook of his nose. Mako enjoyed it best when blood was spilled; it made a thing already meaningful infinitely more so, transformed the televised sport into a religious exercise, into a series of taken oaths. Every now and then, Daddy would begin to speak at his side – talking some inane bullshit about a walk in the park (which Mako adored) or a read-aloud (ditto) – but when the grand sport was on TV, Mako didn’t care much for anything else, not even for the tasty mush being mindlessly ground to bits within his mouth, or the fact that Mummy would be coming home soon if his internal clock was correctly tuned. His world was the scrum, the almost sexual interlock of sweating men upon the pristine green pelt of the field, the  _ hakas  _ performed by the Māori All Blacks before each match, the roaring – oh, the roaring.

Then the day arrived that Daddy drove Mako to Masterton at noon and left him with Miss Shanna and Robbie, who was then eleven years-old and took pleasure in decorating both his and Mako’s faces with the implements he’d gradually snuck out of his mother’s bathroom drawer in the preceding months: lipstick in a shade called “Warm Tangerine,” eye shadow the distinctly early ‘90s color of glittery unicorn hair, blush enough to mimic the symptoms of rosacea, eyeliner pencil used to draw hearts and asterisks beside each of their four eyes. Miss Shanna, for her part, sat in the kitchen making phone calls and chain-smoking cigarettes into the vent above the stove. Every now and then she’d pop into Robbie’s bedroom and spy the boys working in front of his mirror, Robbie peeling a slightly pissy Mako out of his overalls to dress him in his own oversized clothes – tank tops and sweaters and skinny pants that utterly failed in their skinniness on Mako’s seven year old legs – but then she would disappear without speaking or even making her presence known, to tend the beets in the backyard and light the sixth or tenth cigarette.

Mummy picked Mako up at a quarter to five. She showed him how to put the Elton John mix cassette into the tape deck himself. She spoke in the truncated sentences that implicitly signaled to Mako that she was not pleased, and he – knowing the ways of the road, of kilometers, of gas mileage, and of travel with the intimacy of not a seven year-old, but perhaps that of a twelve or thirteen year-old – naturally assumed that the time and gas required to come and rescue him from Masterton was too much of a strain on his mother, and that the furrowed pyramid of tension in the center of her forehead was his doing, that he’d built it. He’d learned guilt so early in his life that it had become a mere reflex by the time he was several years older and riding in cars to Tauranga to meet never-before-seen fish.

After dinner on the night of the trip to Masterton, after Mako had been put to bed by a Mummy who was incredibly short – incredibly low to the ground – Daddy came home and had the final incomprehensible dialogue with Mummy. This did not figure in Mako’s dream, as he’d never witnessed it. There were only the imaginative, emotional shapes that alluded to this event: cubist faces contorted in violet expressions of anger and despair, birds being shot right off tree branches in the dark. A baleen whale swam in a cosmos of clear blue, bellowing its perfect song and searching for it – its baby? A friend? Mako didn’t know. He didn’t know and this was almost upsetting enough to send him breathing hard into the world of consciousness, but then the dream folded its origami pages into a new configuration and he was riding the train from Tauranga to Wellington, clutching his knapsack while he watched the New Zealand countryside fly by outside the window.

He was eight years old when Daddy – by then having morphed into just Dad – refused to hug him for the very first time on the platform at Wellington Railway Station. Every other weekend he’d get shipped south to see the man, who had transformed without warning from the cornerstone of his daytime life to a person he only saw an average of four days a month, because – as he later learned through a combination of sheer observation, years of internalization, and straight up experience of the fact – he was his mother’s child, he belonged to Rui from the day he’d been born, and Ezra would only ever possess him as one did a library book: for prescribed lengths of time, without any real sense of permanence, and with love so careful and so reserved it did not alter the inner stitching or the delicate outer shell of the object except by accident. This, Mako supposes, is why Dad refused to hug him after he turned eight. He’d forgotten the specific inciting incident of this heartbreaking phenomenon for years, had only lived with the hangover of hurt and emotional distance until it became a normal, unremarkable feature in the tableau of his relationship with his father, but last night he was brought directly back to the way Dad had looked at his up- and outstretched arms like they were made of inert foam tubing and simply took them in his hands and lowered them to dangle emptily by his sides.

“Ruf fyc ouin dneb?” he’d asked. “ **Three hours** ec cilr y muhk desa du ced.”

Robbie would spend the weekends with Ezra as well. As a twelve year old, he professed a love for psychology that manifested primarily as him stealing Cosmos from the grocery store in order to take the personality quizzes within and force others (primarily Mako) to answer the questions as well.

“How would you describe your wedding theme?” Robbie would ask, lying belly-down in the backyard with his legs swinging in lopsided circles in the air. “Fun, colorful and edgy? Flower crown central? Simple and chic? So romantic it hurts? Or powerful and inspirational?”

Mako, engrossed in the aquatic superhero he was bringing to life with Crayola color pencils in his sketchbook, would mumble, “I don’t care…”

“How can you not care?” Robbie noisily popped his bubble gum – a nice, big pink bubble that Mako envied deeply, he was so bad at doing it himself – and started flipping his Cosmo’s pages to the horoscopes in the back. He’d say, in a whisper meant to be heard and taken offense at, “You’re eight, though, so of course you’re like, an idiot.”

Then Mako would protest the appellation, and Robbie would throw down his Cosmo to steal Mako’s favorite “Blue Bolt” color pencil, and the two boys would wrestle each other into the overgrown grass – rolling around in it, grinding their palms into each other’s faces, hooking their legs together and pressing down with savage force on each other’s diaphragms until their breaths were dangerously short, until they began to scream out in hard-pressed surrender. All the while Dad remained enclosed in the alabaster tower of his office, performing bibliographic surgery with the air conditioner turned up so high that the house felt more like an icebox than a place where real homo sapiens resided. When this particular condition was complained about by one of his sons, Ezra would simply say, “ **Wear a sweater** .” When – between the designated hours of noon and four, and then again from eight at night to seven in the morning – any speech within the house proper soared above inside voice volume (i.e.,  _ VOL 10 _ on the television set), the offender(s) would be promptly sent into the backyard. When the yelling outside pierced the perfect reverie of otherwise soundproof quiet inside the office, Ezra would briefly stick his head out of the upstairs window and say, “ **Keep it down, boys** .” 

Mako and Robbie spent a lot of time outside.

Mako and Robbie shared a bunk bed in their father’s house. Thanks to his status as the elder and therefore physically larger sibling, Robbie laid claim to the lower and accordingly physically larger bunk. In this bunk the boys would gather their duvets and fasten them in thick knots around the rungs supporting the top bunk’s twin-size mattress, thus creating makeshift hammocks in which they would dangle, blissfully weightless, and read chapter books for seventh graders in the bedroom’s dim lamplight until Dad came to check on them and fussed at them for both transgressing their bedtime and straining the cheap bedframe, which made it liable to break. Two weekends later, they’d make their hammocks again and get fussed at again. They did this every other weekend for over a year. By the time Robbie was fourteen, he was too heavy and too long to keep it up, so they stopped, but the good memories of buoyant togetherness remained, and so Mako dreamed about them.

Mako dreamed of all the time he spent on the floor of Dad’s office while the man worked, aching to move and to fidget and to speak, to be an uninhibited thing with uninhibited expressions. When he began to read  _ Don Quixote _ at the age of nine, he made it his business to ask Dad about every word he didn’t know and even some that he did just to be talking to the man, to be more than merely a whorl in the hardwood.

“What does  _ obstinacy _ mean?” he’d ask.

“ **Stubbornness** ,” Dad would say without looking up from the  _ World Book Volume 15 _ he was working at.

“What does  _ infatuation _ mean?”

“ **It means… intense love that lasts for a short while.** ”

“What does  _ basilisk _ mean?”

“ **It’s a kind of monstrous serpent.** ”

“What does  _ circumspection _ mean?”

“ **Mako, you promised me we wouldn’t do this today.** ” Dad raised his head only to point at the bookshelf to his right. “ **You can use the dictionary if you need help.** ”

The truth was, Mako had his own dictionary. In fact, he carried his dictionary around with him everywhere – on his train rides to Wellington and back; to his school in Raukokore; on his trips with Nana Victoria into the hills when they’d take the sheep out to pasture; even in bed, when thoughts about life and sex and people would whirl through his head faster and harder than he could physically take at times. He’d had his dictionary with him at that very moment – its heavily worn paperback cover tearing at the edges, the red spine so creased with wear one could barely even make out “ _ The Merriam-Webster Dictionary _ ” printed vertically upon it – and he’d kept it tucked beneath his left thigh for the explicit purpose of helping him get through the more linguistically dense portions of Cervantes whenever he came to them –

He just didn’t want to use it. He wanted to use his father, but his father wouldn’t be used.

At home in Raukokore, he would stand at the bathroom mirror stained with speckles of toothpaste and compare his features to Ezra’s. He supposed they had the same squarish, long-faced bone structure, but his eyes were so big and black like his mother’s; his hair the same sheepy, sable mop as his mother’s; his skin tone just as brown sugary brown as his mother’s; his lips the same squished Cupid’s bow shape as his mother’s. He would wonder if he would prematurely gray like Ezra (and he would, in time). He would wonder whether he’d someday need glasses like Ezra (he would). He would look and look and barely see his father in himself at all, and he would think that perhaps he was the Māori Jesus – immaculately conceived – but also that he was so sad to be the way he was. Sometimes, in his most melodramatic of moments, he’d rather not have been any way at all. 

Before Mako woke, he dreamed of the night his sleeplessness collided with Dad’s. After wrangling with intractable consciousness and the infuriating cacophony of Robbie’s snores for hours, he’d climbed down out of the top bunk and wandered his way into the living room, where a 1:00 AM Ezra sat watching a TV movie in, wonder of wonders, a T-shirt. His father never wore T-shirts.

“Hi,” Mako had said, twelve years old and just starting to get so long in the arms and legs.

“ **Can’t sleep?** ” Dad had asked. He’d long had a thing about not looking at Mako when he spoke to him at least fifty percent of the time.

“No.” Mako went to sit on the sofa across from his father’s armchair and, feeling around blindly for explanations, for chit-chat, for anything to say at all and coming up with bupkis, folded his gangling legs beneath him and turned his attention to  _ Star Trek V: The Final Frontier _ . It had been so easy to give up it was almost comical.

For minutes that lasted decades, they’d sat alone in silence mediated only by the sounds of overwrought space opera and the electric hum of the refrigerator. Several times, Mako had worked himself up to speak and then found his father’s expression too remote for him to try anything, and exhausted by the internal effort of all this, he began to drift, gradually progressing from sitting upright to leaning against sofa’s suede arm, then from leaning against the sofa’s suede arm to lying with his head propped uncomfortably atop it. Before he’d even become aware of it, insomnia had given way to fitful rest. There is something so surreal about sleeping within dreams. Two dream-hours later, he’d awoken with the afghan draped over his  _ koru _ -curled body and his father puttering around in the kitchen – washing dishes if the sound of running water and clinking glass was anything to go on.

He could have gotten up and gone back to bed. It would have been more comfortable than remaining on the couch. Listening to Dad softly humming the tune to “Bennie and the Jets” and swishing soapy water around in a porcelain bowl, he’d turned his face into the sofa cushion and dipped once more into sleep – and with this Mako woke up, found Jem beside him, and began to babble on about steam locomotives until he was shushed back into slumber.

“They’re so romantic, babe,” he’d murmured.

“Please go to sleep,” Jem had replied.

This morning, after getting to work, Mako pulls up his personal email and spends a grueling ten minutes composing a reply to his father’s message while also sweetening his third cup of coffee, engaging in the typical first-thing small talk with Annie, and manually alphabetizing the icons on his desktop in both ascending and descending order.

#    
  


**FROM:** _Mako Gehringer <kiwishark86@gmail.com>   
_**TO:** _Ezra Gehringer <ezragehringer47@gmail.com>  
_ **SUBJECT:** _Re: Hope you are well_

hey dad. sorry for the late reply. it’s morning here, so i assume it’s way late at night where you’re at. i hope you’re sleeping well.

i’m pretty okay. i’m considering purchasing a share in my magazine and cashing in on myself, so to speak, but the details have yet to be worked out with my editor in chief. i’ll let you know if anything comes of it. kory is doing awesome, by the way. she actually started high school a few months ago, and she’s still super excited about the whole thing, believe it or not; i think she’s convinced she’s a lot older than she is. maybe i’m just being cynical and having a hard time letting her grow up. it wouldn’t surprise me if this is the case. i’m scared of the day she finally ends up jaded and tired like i am, but she surprises me every day with her happiness and her optimism. i swear she’s too good to have come from a person like me.

i’m sorry to hear about the funeral home and all the noise that’s coming with it, but at least it’s one of the most interesting buildings that could possibly be built across the street from your house, excepting possibly a brothel or a consignment store. 

also, i did ask robbie how they were doing and they said they were fine and that they’d give you a call soon. if i were you i’d be a little more forthcoming about just talking with them if you’re so concerned about their life.

write back whenever! you know i’m always easy to reach.

\-- mako 

#    
  


Mako pauses for long seconds before clicking the _Send_ button, contemplating the particular mishmash of tone and intent in his composition. He feels so mean, and the formality of email is always in some way mean, and the older he has gotten the more and more leeway his father has given him to be mean to him – self-righteously mean, I-may-be-a-social-retard-but-I’m-better-at-this-game-then-you-are mean. It’s suddenly very hard to remember the rides they took back to the train station every other Sunday afternoon until Mako and his mother moved back to Wellington, the silence between them that straddled the line between uncomfortable and just resigned, the fear that lived in Mako’s heart revolving around saying anything wrong to his father, because maybe if he did they’d really stop talking for good. Mako remembers the rides regardless. He remembers the dull _clunk_ that accompanied Ezra unlocking all of the car doors. He remembers his father waving at him on the platform before he stepped onto the train with his knapsack, his dictionary, and his heart on his back and in his hands. He clicks _Send_ , then asks Annie what’s on the agenda for the day.

On the first Tuesday of December, Mum spends her afternoon in the radiology department of Oschner Baptist. Later that night, after everyone comes home, she horrifies Mako by clutching openly at her breasts, complaining of the discomfort of getting her routine mammogram done as if the procedure was intentionally designed however many decades ago to bring systematic pain to women (and in some respects, it probably was). Mako does not think about his mother’s colossal breasts for the rest of the week – during which Mum gardens out in the steadily increasing cold until every bone in her body aches and Mako spends his lunch breaks perusing Magazine Street shops for a gift for Jem’s upcoming birthday – until Saturday morning comes and Mum’s radiologist’s office calls the house at 9:13 in the morning, asking her to come in on Monday and review the results of her test. When Mako gets home from work that day, Kory dashing on into the house behind him and zipping upstairs while he locks the door, Mum is standing on the threshold between the kitchen and the dining area, watching him with both of her hands wrapped around the back of her neck.

“Hey,” she says.

“Hey, Mum,” he replies. Peeling his hooded bomber off to throw onto the coat tree, he says, “Have you been outside today? I can’t stand this gross, wet cold, it’s awful.”

“I went to the doctor today,” she says – presumably in response to his question about whether or not she’s been outside. When Mako takes the time to actually look upon her face, he finds her expression a blank, indiscernible screen, her eyes focused upon him with a perfect calmness that makes his stomach flip. He watches her carefully.

“Yeah?” he asks.

“She found… an aberration.” Mum’s voice does not waver or flutter; when she blinks, it is not nervous so much as simply reflexive, natural. “She’s having the thing biopsied so nothing’s set in stone yet, but she thinks it’s safe to say I’m out of remission.” 

A moment passes in which Mako can’t see anything, just lives totally in the words “out of remission” until he understands without internally repeating them what they mean, how each syllable sounds on its own. There was a moment nine years ago where he’d had a quite similar experience, where Mum had told him she’d been diagnosed with Stage I breast cancer and he’d forgotten for five minutes how to hear anything but the sound of his own name, and even with that he’d had so much trouble. There was a moment fourteen years before that where his grandmother had died after two weeks of shitting blood and crying rivers for the pain in her abdomen and begging her doctors for more morphine – so far from the person he’d known her as since forever, who endured without pleading and helped instead of needing help. That time, the very first time, every sense had been lost to him for he doesn’t know how long. This time is better, he thinks. This time, he knows how to feel around for the bottom of the stairs and gently plop himself down into a sitting position, and when objects finally begin to materialize again, there is Mum in her Genesis T-shirt and her house shoes, standing above him and saying, “Don’t you start crying.”

“Why?” he asks.

“Because I’m not going to die,” she replies. In an act of rare tenderness, her hand finds the curve of his jaw and cradles it. “I’ve been on this Earth too long to die.”

“That makes… the opposite of sense.”

“You would think so,” Mum says. Her fingers slide from the place just beneath Mako’s left ear to the underside of his chin, tip his face up to hers so that she can kiss him in the very center of his forehead. “I’ll beat this thing now just like I beat it then. I don’t want to see any tears out of you.”

“I’m  _ not _ going to cry,” Mako stubbornly insists. He stays true to this insistence for the rest of the day proper.

For an hour, he doodles in the margins of his crossword puzzle, unable to focus beyond  _ 7 Across: famous neurologist Sacks _ . When Jem gets home from teaching, Mako enlists him as kitchen staff to help and make conversation with him while he pan-fries tilapia and says squat about Mum’s cancer. Kory asks him to proofread a history paper for her after dinner and he does so without a second thought. Stevie occupies his attention for a whole fifteen minutes, rolling her fat little body around on the floor and all but demanding to be loved. Mako floats through his afternoon and evening in a cold panic that only barely manages to touch the outer exterior of his face and his body, and every time he slips up by, say, dropping his fork or fumbling the television remote over and over again – all the feeling in his hands numbed out until gone – he simply laughs it off in the face of Jem’s concerned looks and Mum’s joke about him having Parkinson’s or something, and continues to eat his really, really great fillet and lower the volume from 30 to 25.

In the shower, the knot in Mako’s stomach turns inside out and begs to be emptied, bloody, onto the tile floor, where it can slowly disintegrate into colloidal lumps and then eventually into nothing in the drain. He runs the water so hot that it scalds him. When it touches his skin, it takes mere seconds for the flesh to turn bright red. He waits until his body, iced all over in his pure, pristine anxiety, melts into nothing but untainted, healthy blood and liquefied bone, and then – in his thawed, dissolved state – leans his liquid head against the shower tile and breaks into a series of sobs so aurally horrifying they nearly shock him right out of crying anymore. 

It occurs to him, in the distant, dissociating corner of his mind, that he sounds as though he is being gored by some grand, tusked animal. It occurs to him that he sounds as though he is dying, that maybe he is dying, that he could be destroyed by this panic of his. The shower wall looks great; he leans into it with all his weight. The gastric knot whines, and he whines with it.

In the months before he’d moved to New Orleans, when Mum had been declared “in remission” with very little hope of ever coming out of it, he’d thoroughly banished these things, these feelings – this massive complex of fear and neurosis concerning the Big C. Here they come flying back out of their cave on vengeful wings, but only where he can see and count them all like individual bats while they do their swarming, then shoo them back inside so that he can safely bear the observation of others without being unnecessarily questioned. It’s perfectly possible for him to endure in this duplicitous way. He can do his crying in the bathroom at night and then during the day have his anxiety attacks in predominantly invisible fashion. He’s done it before, in fact. He’s feigned functional behavior for months at a time, simulated normal conversation, worn artificial expressions and spoken artificial speech while burning through an average of three meltdowns an hour and just barely keeping the skin on his body from flying off in flaccid patchwork quilt chunks. He’s lost a whole year of his life living like that. He can stand to lose another.

Out of the shower and in his sleep clothes, he goes downstairs to turn all the lights off and tell Mum goodnight. She’s sitting up in her bed with her hair down and a book in her lap when he pokes his head into her room. At the sound of the door’s quiet creak when he pushes it open, she looks up.

“Hey, you,” she says, curving her mouth into a tissue paper smile.

“Hey,” he replies for the second time today. Scared to approach her for fear that she will see the puffiness around his eyes and know that he lied to her, that he has been crying, he maintains his slightly bent stance in the darkened doorway as he says, “I just wanted to say goodnight.”

“Well, come here and give us a kiss,” Mum orders, in that cordial and silly way that makes her bossiness that much more bearable. Mako hesitates for all of two seconds, then makes his way over to the bed, into the lamplight beside it.

He kisses her at the right corner of her mouth, and she at the right corner of his. Assuming his full height, he finds his mother watching his face carefully, raking her eyes over his hipstery growth of facial hair, his slightly swollen lower eyelids, his shower-damp curls fingered back and off his forehead, his lips made of stone. Mako doesn’t know what she sees or what she’s thinking when she tells him, “I love you, you know that?” but the whole thing is almost too Hallmark, too I-have-cancer-so-now-I’m-going-to-tell-you-the-sweetest-things, that he nearly loses his composure and resumes that deathlike sobbing from the shower –

But he doesn’t. He just puts on a tissue paper smile of his own and replies, “I love you, too,” then leaves the room, goes upstairs, and gets in bed with Jem, who is reading  _ The New York Times _ on his Kindle.

For a long time, he lies on his stomach with his face buried in his pillow, and Jem doesn’t say anything to him – just reaches over to lay a hand on the center of his back. Mako attributes this conscious distance, this separate togetherness, to the unspoken understanding that regularly passes between them, his unexpressed but clearly appreciated quota for sympathetic interrogation and Lifetime movie moments. He’s been steeping in the uncomfortable heat coating the inside of his skin – the slow-burn panic attack freezing him in place, squeezing toxically tiny breaths out of him and into his pillow – for what is actually ten minutes but feels more like three hours when Jem puts his Kindle down on the bedside table and then rolls over to cover half of Mako’s body with half of his own, slipping his hand up beneath his right breast and, perhaps inadvertently, tweaking his pierced nipple through his T-shirt. Mako jumps.

“That’s sensitive, you egg,” he says into his pillow.

“Sorry,” Jem replies, his mouth pressed up close to the nape of Mako’s neck. He kisses Mako there just as soon as the word passes between his lips, then makes a  _ hmm _ ing noise that does so much to turn down the temperature within Mako. “You just felt tense, so I thought some accidental foreplay would ease your nerves.” Almost immediately, he pins an, “I’m kidding,” onto the end of that sentence.

“Let’s start a band called ‘Accidental Foreplay.’” Mako  _ hmm _ s himself when Jem shifts over to cover his whole body, to bracket his legs with his own like parentheses and scoot his pelvis up against his bottom in a way that would be sexy were it not a Monday and were Mako not secretly losing his whole goddamn mind. “Weren’t we supposed to be keeping a list of potential band names?”

Jem snorts. “I remember ‘Embryonic Cannibals’ was on there, from that time Loren was telling us about her twin that she absorbed in utero.”

“What was my favorite one? ‘Ghost Shark and the Nightwailers Four’?”

“Oh, that one is so good…” Jem trails off into a second kiss dropped upon Mako’s nape, this one lingering seconds longer than the first, smacking louder against his skin. Mako feels him nuzzle into the curls along the back of his head, feels the warmth of his breath when he says, “You know, it’s not too late to start a band. We’ll have to fly Loren, Tate, and Quick out if we still want them in but I can see us all, prematurely graying and playing the Crescent City circuit. You, of course, have a beautiful voice…”

“You’re just gassing me,” Mako mumbles.

“I’m just loving you,” Jem is quick to reply, in a cooing whisper that makes Mako want to turn over and slow-kiss him until he can’t breathe. “ _ And _ , by the way, telling the truth.”

Mako lets him have his truth without a word in protest. He hooks his foot up and around Jem’s ankle in a silent show of yes and stay here and I love you so much I can’t even say it, and Jem just kisses him a third time and lays his head down against his, crushing him into the bed with his superior body weight in just the way Mako has come to adore.

The heat begins to fade into drowsy, moderately bearable warmth. The lamp on the nightstand is still on, but Mako cannot bring himself to care. He is on the cusp of extinguishing every thought and every light in his mind when Jem whispers, like he knows saying it too loudly will surely break something, “You know, you can talk to me about it.”

Mako doesn’t even think before he murmurs, “There’s nothing to talk about,” and the swiftness of this lie fed directly to the person he’s unofficially pledged his lifelong fidelity to is enough to shock him, kind of. Kind of because he’s been like this for such a long time now: instinctively self-protective and feeling like shit because of it.

Jem believes him. He believes him and Mako hates everything because of it. He wraps his arms tight around Mako and says, “Alrighty,” briefly raises himself up off the mattress to switch the lamp off and plug his phone in to charge, then returns to holding Mako until he falls asleep and even after, how much he loves his big, dishonest man. Mako decides that he’s going to take tomorrow off work, then lies awake in Jem’s arms for five whole hours before finally surrendering to sleep.

All through Tuesday, it rains. Mako rolls out of bed at 6:53 AM – approximately two hours into his glorified nap – to call Priya and announce his intention to not come into work today, then hop in the car with Kory and drive her to school through the Ysian deluge with Broken Social Scene on the radio.

“You listen to the weirdest tunes,” Kory remarks from the passenger seat, adjusting her elasticized headband in the little mirror on the sun visor. When she starts to go for his phone, presumably to select something different for the background music, Mako’s hand snatches out like a viper and catches her wrist in midair.

“This was the shit when I was in college,” he says, a little or a lot defensive. He tightens his grip when Kory tries to pull her arm away, threading his hand around to twine their fingers together and let their palms commune atop the center console. Kory sighs, but declines to struggle further against the contact.

“Why are you in your pajamas?” she asks, glancing at his oversized T-shirt from Café Du Monde and his faded floral sweatpants that once belonged to her mother, his discarded flip-flops wet from the rain and his bare right foot pressed down on the accelerator. “Are you going to work like that?”

“I’m taking a sick day,” Mako replies, vague but not lying in the slightest. Kory’s thumb brushes back and forth in small, squished circles over his; he’s not looking at her, but he can feel her gaze go soft and round around the edges.

“Do you want me to call you at lunch?”

Mako makes a face at the road in response to both the shitty early morning traffic and Kory’s question. Flicking on his turn signal, he merges into the leftmost lane on I-10 West, cutting off a black BMW in the process and subsequently ignoring the disgruntled honk he gets in response. “You shouldn’t be using your phone at all at school,” he says. “Except, of course, for emergencies.”

“Is this an emergency, though?” Kory asks, and it is in this moment exactly that Mako realizes that his daughter is more clearheaded and calm than he is about the monster on his back, and he’s been living with the monster longer than she’s even been alive. He doesn’t quite know how he managed to swing that, if it’s his doing at all.

He drums the pads of his fingers against hers. He studies the unwavering, wet stretch of the highway before him; the black and beige and blue beetle-like cars weaving about and around one another; the lightstanders still lit due to the dim, overcast sky. He would be conflicted about how to answer if his bone-deep instinct – equally masculine and parental – didn’t all but ensure his protection of Kory from his own bullshit to the best of his ability; thus, his wholly non-conflicted answer is, “No.” He makes his face the picture of total nonchalance. “Don’t worry your pretty little head about me. It’s just one of those days.”

In his peripheral vision, Kory turns her head away to cast her eyes out of the rain-streaked window. She adjusts their hands to gently and repeatedly pull at the short hairs on the top of his with her fingertips. When Broken Social Scene gives way to 311, Mako registers the bounce of her legs up-and-down and her body side-to-side along with the music’s rhythm, and despite the ridiculous urge to lock every good feeling up inside the cage of emotional badness he’s currently cultivating, he smiles at the sheer thing of her, at her openness of expression, at her newfound satisfaction with the soundtrack, at her unadulterated existence within his personal sphere.

“Gimme a kiss,” he tells her when he pulls up on the curb on the block across from Lusher.

Kory retrieves her bubble umbrella from her backpack, then leans across the center console to smush her lips against his bearded chin. She laughs immediately after the clumsy contact – “That tickled, oh my God!” – and she’s laughing still when Mako gets her mouth with his: a proper peck on the lips only disrupted by the silly string noises coming out of her.

“Have a good day, babe,” he says on her way out of the Jetta.

“You too!” she hollers back through the rain, then swings the door closed and skips across the street under a semi-sphere of clear plastic, in her bright orange windbreaker and her Vans soaked through with rainwater.

Within twenty minutes, Mako is dripping his way back into the house, kicking his flip-flops into the corner by the door, and slinking like a big wet cat upstairs and into the master bedroom. He ignores Jem when, downstairs, he calls at him from the coffee-smelling kitchen – “Mako? You’re back fast.” – just takes the stairs two at a time and puts his body in the very center of his bed, swaddling himself with blankets until the only visible part of him, to an outsider, is the hair at the top of his head.

Some indistinct amount of time later, after which Mako has begun to alternately doze and silently contemplate every wrong thing he has done within the meager hour he’s spent awake this morning, he feels the mattress dip in the neighborhood of his left hip and the gentle pressure of a hand on his upper back.

“Hey.” Jem’s voice reaches him through the insulation of cotton-polyester blend. “I’m gonna be out kind of late today, I hope you know that.”

Mako starts to make a vague, really rude groaning noise in response, then decides to be an adult and wriggles around until his face emerges from beneath the covers and he can look at Jem directly. “Okay,” he says.

Jem’s face is awash in love. Mako thinks about death and dying. “Will you be okay alone?” Jem asks, then, backtracking, “I mean, Mum will be here, but–”

“I don’t need you to hold my hand,” Mako expels in a tired, prolonged breath that comes out so much meaner than he intends for it to. He presses his eyelids together for a long time and waits until he feels softer, smoother in his person before he speaks again. “You’re sweet, and I love you, but this is just my normal shit, okay? I don’t need you to drop everything and sweep me up into your arms like some big white knight every time I catch a mood.”

“I’m not really asking you what you need, though,” Jem says, in that firm yet gentle reminding way he has that is more than potent enough to stand up to Mako’s exhausted bitchery. “I’m asking you what you want.”

“I don’t want you to skip out on  _ your job _ for me.” Mako does the herculean work of turning from his stomach onto his back and says the rest to the ceiling: “My own job is already one casualty too many to this stupid disease.”

Jem watches him for three long, silent seconds, his mouth a thoughtful knot of flesh just above his lightly stubbled chin, then takes his glasses off, sets them momentarily on the bedside table, and scoots farther onto the bed to lay his head on Mako’s chest through the blankets. It should be the other way around – should be Jem’s chest and Mako’s sad, heavy cranium haloed with wild, wooly curls – but Mako feels comforted regardless. He lies with Jem until he drops briefly into sleep, wakes up for the thirty seconds it takes to kiss Jem goodbye and bend his body into a fetal position around his pillow, then drops off again, harder.

Mako sleeps fitfully and wakes often. Each time he floats blearily up to the surface of consciousness, he is granted by some unseen internal power energy enough to open his eyes, glance at the digital clock on the nightstand and read 10:39 AM, or 12:04 PM, or 2:15 PM, then lay his head back down in its perfect imprint on his pillow and drift motionless in half-awareness until he is lost to the repetitive video track of his dreams once more. When conscious, he calls this process The Great Ossification or, when he’s feeling less eloquent and pretentious, Statue Mode. The hours spent in a singular, unchanging position – awake or asleep, half-vertical or entirely horizontal – these are the hallmarks of his depression when it hits in particularly tropical fashion. Mako waits in these hours as he does in the grocery store when the rain pours down and his car sits halfway across the parking lot: silently and watchfully, with occasional bursts of great impatience and a sense that the world is spinning at tenth-speed. His limbs – normally alive with manic and nervous energy, flailing and grasping about in emphasis of every spoken word – occupy themselves with the most tremendous misbehavior in these hours: they just don’t move. No part of him does. Everything of him refuses anything but leaden physicality and the embryonic inertia of his spectacular depressed mood – the potentiality of physical and emotional change snowballing wildly inside him and yet entirely arrested for the moments that feel like months of his angst – and it brings a kind of ecstasy to imagine cutting the sluggish, deviant parts of himself away with a meat cleaver until he is nothing but his own essentials, nothing but lungs, heart, intestines, and medulla oblongata, and no gross motor movement is required of him at all. 

Mako shudders to think he is so unnecessary in his complexity. Awake just after noon, he mentally counts every body part he can remember and/or name, and cringes. He falls asleep feeling disgusted and kind of angry at having been born a human instead of something unthinking like a blobfish. He continues to not move, to sleep in the quick snatches his synapses allow him. 

He bends his waking thoughts to the offensiveness of his own respiration. It hurts to breathe in his bed today. Sometimes, if he tries, he can open his entire chest and suck in all of the oxygen in the room, but a distinctly wrong feeling accompanies doing so – a feeling of soured pudding in the gut, of head-queasiness, of guilt – so he keeps his body and his breaths as small as possible. Thinks about building a house in the ocean. Wants to drink a whole gallon of cool organic cow’s milk and eat cookies so underbaked they retain some of the consistency of their dough; wants thirteen glasses of brainfreezy water; wants to chew on crushed pieces of ice. He thinks he wants Jem to call him, then changes his mind. He has the thought again fifteen minutes later, then remembers how shitty he was this morning and expels it with a vehemence that knocks him back into tortured, restless sleep. Of course he still dreams of Raukokore – particularly of the tiny, eight-rooms-and-a-concrete-slab school at which he called himself student for nine years of his life. He dreams of the red arch and gateway that was the threshold between in school and out, its shape a hollow simulacrum of a Māori  _ whare _ and its wood carved with the round shapes of playing children. Paxton Kokoro was the principal, a former English major educated in Auckland who liked to keep Mako a minute or so after class to give him short and sweet messages to pass on to Mum – things like, “Tell your mother I hope to see her around,” and “I hope your mother is doing just fine.” He’d always catch Mako and say these things to him out on the concrete slab that functioned as the school’s playground, where the Short twins would see them talking and take the opportunity to call Mako a teacher’s pet and Paxton’s “pet doofus” and then devolve into grunting snickers until Mako did something wretched like show them the V-sign or call them colorful words he’d learned from his “just fine” mother, and of course, this landed them all in trouble with the principal standing just alongside to witness the exchange and Mako would spend hours after school working the floor waxer in the main hallway as punishment, and of the waxer’s dull-insistent  _ brmmm brmmm _ sound Mako dreams. Of the awful Short twins Mako dreams. When he wakes up to check the time, he wonders where the Short twins are now – whether they’re still tearing it up in Raukokore, if their instinctual tendency toward bad behavior has caught up with them yet, if they’re married, if they have kids just as shit-headed as they were – and then he falls back asleep and dreams of the transparency sheets featuring arithmetic problems and vocabulary lists that Max would project onto the board and teach from; of RickyLee Tangonui, the prettiest girl in school with her side ponytails and her ankle bracelets; of recess on the slab, which he always spent alone with his battered and beaten dictionary; of cutouts of farm animals and fish push-pinned to the walls of Max’s classroom, labelled  _ sheep (hipi) _ and  _ dolphin (aihe) _ and  _ chicken (heihei) _ .

Mako opens his eyes sometime after 2:30 and finds his room blindingly opaque. Its usual colors of navy blue walls and mustard-and-white quilt take their time showing themselves, dividing themselves out of the mass of stormy gray nothing tinting his vision, and when they do, he finds he does not particularly care to see them. When he glances over at the clock, he is greeted with a black, timeless face. His phone, plugged into the wall, is at 98% battery and not charging. Thunder rumbles ominously outside. There is a distant yet no less alarming flash of lighting in the window. It occurs to Mako that the power has probably gone out, and the fact of this imbues him with the desire to wander downstairs for the first time since this morning, if for no other reason than to see what Mum is up to.

When he lands in the living room, Mum is sitting on the sofa with her legs folded beneath her and the blinds pulled up to let in what meager sunlight there is available. She is reading  _ Lisey’s Story  _ for possibly the fourth time since their move to New Orleans. She raises her head at his arrival.

“Well, look who decided to join the land of the living,” she croons, just sardonic enough to put Mako’s skin on its hands and knees and send it crawling across the floor.

“I haven’t,” he retorts, turning tail and heading into the kitchen. “I just realized that the power was out and wanted to check on things, you know. Make sure the villagers weren’t looting and raping in the chaos.”

Mum makes a snorting sort of noise. “You’re such a good mayor,” she remarks.

In the kitchen, Stevie is chowing down on her wet food and the bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau on the countertop is speaking to Mako. He acts like he’s looking at the juice and the fruit in the refrigerator for about a minute and a half before abandoning the pretense entirely and emptying a third of the bottle of red into one of their huge plastic cups from Zulu 2018. As he scales the stairs back up to his room, Mum calls to him, “Don’t stay in bed all day, baby! It’s not good for you!” and her words make him feel such a full-bodied awfulness and guilt that as soon as he plants himself back in the middle of his mattress, with his fully-charged laptop open atop his thighs and his cup of wine set aside on the nightstand, he resurrects his internal conflict from earlier and calls Jem, knowing he might not get an answer and feeling absolutely weak for the kneejerkness of it all.

Jem answers on the fourth ring.

“Hey, babe,” comes his warbly voice over the phone. “Just getting up?”

“You’re not busy, are you?” Mako asks rather than answering the question. He reaches over to retrieve his Mardi Gras cup, takes a long, thirsty sip of the fragrant liquid within.

“No, I’m between classes,” Jem says. There is a brief, unidentifiable creaking noise over the line. “What’s up?”

“I’m…” Mako starts to say words, to give vent to all of the strange and horrifying things going on inside of him, but then he remembers his strength and his dishonesty last night and just cannot stomach the idea of fessing up to all of that, so he cuts himself off with a clearly audible sigh and concludes the sentence with a simple, “Such a jerk.”

Jem produces a quick, somewhat surprised laugh. “This is… not under debate?”

Mako frowns. “Wow, I’m like, trying to apologize to you and you’re gonna sit here and make me feel worse?”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Jem exhales and there is that creaking noise a second time. “I’m not trying to. I’m just agreeing with you, I guess. You were being kind of a kid this morning.”

Mako glares at his faint reflection in the darkened monitor of his MacBook. “You were being overbearing.”

A beat of silence.  _ Creak _ . “Look.” This is the last tone of voice Mako wants to hear. “I don’t want to have an argument with you over the phone on the day you’re taking off from work, but I feel like you should know how much it honestly… it hurts that you won’t let me, you know. Care for you.”

“That’s not true.”

“It’s not?”

“I let you care for me all the time. Isn’t that the basis of a relationship?”

“You’d think, huh?” At the interjection of light and humor into Jem’s voice, Mako finds himself able to breathe again, and he takes another drag from his wine. “I’m not talking about kissing and cuddling or like, me making you coffee on the weekends, Mako,” Jem says. “I’m talking about me literally being allowed to give a shit about your mood.”

“It’s not a big deal, is the thing–”

“Okay! But I think it is. These are your feelings. This is your health. Why am I not allowed to care about those things and express that to you, huh?”

Mako closes his eyes about halfway through Jem’s lecture, overwhelmed by his partner’s rightness and his own undeniable wrongness in this matter. He is struck with the urge to lie down, still on the line, and go back to sleep while Jem listens to the sound of his breathing, but because the whole point of this phone call was to move back into the comfortable space in which he and Jem normally exist and because he loves Jem, he keeps his head pointedly away from his pillows and talks back.

“It just…” Mako glances over at the powerless clock, at the windows covered by sheer curtains and revealing to him the dull, rainy outside. “It’s uncomfortable for me. I feel like I don’t deserve that kind of crazy, scrupulous attention to my mood, you know?”

“I do know. And I completely disagree.”

Mako, for the first time today, releases a noise somewhat resembling a laugh – perhaps more in the neighborhood of a scoff, upon closer inspection, but serving the same basic function as a laugh. “You’ve made that very clear.”

“Do you understand that you’re the most important person in the world, in my estimation?” When Mako groans, taken by the oh so loving gayness of it all, by the seventh grade soulmate honesty, Jem raises his voice several decibels and adds, “ _ Do you understand _ that you are the only person I would move across the globe to be with? Whose child I would raise? Do you understand that?”

“Yes. Do  _ you _ understand that I have the self-esteem of a twelve year-old?”

“Of course.”  _ Creak _ . “I also know we’re going to be having this argument until the day we die, so get used to this, honey. It ain’t over until it’s really over.”

At the joking mention of death, Mako is suddenly very thirsty and very interested in that strange creaking sound. He makes himself swallow some wine and asks, “What the hell is that noise?”

“What noise?”

“That creaking noise.”

Jem is silent for a moment or so before he realizes, “ _ Oh _ , it’s my desk chair. I think I need to oil it, but how is that even done? I don’t have a clue.”

Mako watches the ceiling as Jem speaks, knockout exhausted. His head is pounds lighter atop his neck, his center of gravity somewhere in the vicinity of his collarbone rather than below his navel, where it belongs. Having had his ears trained to pick up such miniscule sounds in the intervening seven years since they first got the cat, he hears Stevie pad into the room on near-silent paws and thus isn’t shocked right out of his sanity when she hops up onto the bed and begins to slowly sniff and feel around with her nose and her whiskers. Outside, a thunderclap sounds. Within seconds, the bedside clock begins to flash 0:00 in loud red digits. Stevie finds his right leg and jumps a little at the unexpected contact. Mako blinks at her and says, in the direction of his phone’s invisible mouthpiece and the whole wide world, “I miss you.”

Jem’s voice is a soft, subtle thing when he replies. “I miss you, too. Are you alright?”

Mako shrugs, knowing Jem can’t see him. “I’ve got red wine and Stevie with me in bed.”

“Stay classy, baby. I’ve got class in five, but can I call you back in a few hours?”

“Of course.”

Hanging up, Mako throws back the remainder of his wine and then lays his grapey head down in his newly electrified bedroom, Stevie a purring mound curled against his calves and his laptop discarded on the floor beside the bed. He knows he’s in for a monstrous wine headache later and feels not altogether too worried about it. There are things he should attend to – namely the matter of who’s going to pick Kory up from school in a few hours and the incredibly tedious act of resetting all of the digital clocks in the house, of which there are three – and there should be pills and food for this: sugar cookies and sundry stimulants, edible things capable of supplying him with adequate amounts of energy in quick, handy bursts so that he might complete all of the things on his scattered mental to-do list without skyrocketing past simple animation into sheer and thoroughly unhelpful anxiety – but oh, my God, a person gets so tired, and he’s not quite so lacking in self-respect to turn to cocaine in the thirty-eighth year of his life. He sets an alarm on his phone and returns for two hours to a sleep markedly slipperier and easier than today’s earlier slumber. Could he become an alcoholic in his campaign to sleep better?

“Almost certainly,” he thinks. Then he’s gone.   
  
  



	8. 08

#  _ 8 _

Mum bought Nana Victoria a new television set and a dryer for her sixty-seventh birthday. The gifts were more for herself than they were for her mother, in all likelihood; Victoria Ngata, born in 1926, had spent most of her life thinking television irrelevantly magical or inessential save for the music programs that were rather infrequently offered in New Zealand through the better part of the twentieth century, and she liked drying laundry on the line just fine, as it was what she had always done. Mum, on the other hand, was not content to spend the rest of her life in Raukokore living like some backwater heathen when she had the choice not to, so she drove over to Tauranga in Nana’s hulking ute the day after packing up her only child and moving back to her hometown, and in Tauranga she purchased the two things that, to her, counted as modern day necessities. She slapped some red ribbon on the boxes and returned home smiley-faced and gracious.

“Happy early birthday, Mum,” she’d said, panting, after they’d gotten the television up onto the porch and the dryer just out of the truck bed for the time being.

Nana, with her leonine hair pulled out of her face by a sweat-soaked bandana and her wiry arms trembling with exertion, gave her daughter and then the dryer a sideways look and simply said, “We’ll have to call Molly and Mr. Jackie over tomorrow to help us hook that monster up.” Then, reaching over to lay an affectionate hand on Rui’s upper arm, where the swirling traditional designs of the Māori had been tattooed for up to a decade at that time, she added, “Thank you, baby.”

Nana took to using the dryer with a vengeance. She despised dirty clothes. It wasn’t a neatness thing; Nana was far from a clean freak, didn’t mind getting her hands dirty, had likely spent damn near her entire life in some state of griminess being raised on a farm that she later inherited and went not a single day without working on. It was just that she so privileged the comfort of clean fabric against the skin, the menial satisfaction of folding clothes followed by the visual satisfaction of seeing them folded and stacked in perfect multicolored cubes upon the couch. She indoctrinated her grandson in this love of clean clothes almost immediately after he came to live with her, starting on the day she found him lying face-up in his hand-me-down bed at 12:23 in the afternoon and said to him, “Come on, Mako. Let’s figure out how to work that dryer, eh?”

Mako would have preferred to stay right where he was, studying the wood-paneled ceiling and thinking of magical fishpeople who ate human babies for strength, but Nana, in her relative newness in his life, commanded a certain terrifying reverence with her status as his grandmother, so he let himself be taken by the hand and led outside to the laundry area under the carport. With seven year-old arms, he helped load the wet clothes from the washer into the dryer’s pristine cubic stomach; when Nana lifted him up, hugging him against her chest so that he was level with the dryer’s various knobs and switches, he followed her gentle-voiced directions: “Turn the big one over to PERMANENT PRESS. Yeah, the one with the really big letters – do you know your letters? P-E-R-M… yep, that one. See that switch? Turn it to the left. What hand do you write with, Mako? Your  _ left _ hand?! Isn’t that special? Do you want to go back inside and show me how you write? Come on–” She lowered him back onto his bare feet and let him lead the way into the house. “I’ll let you use my really pretty paper.”

Nana’s paper had tiny pink flowers on spindly black branches printed upon it. She told Mako she’d ordered it from Japan.

“What’s Japan?” Mako asked, upon which a look came over Nana’s face that was both frightening and delightful in its emotional intensity – her eyes aglow, her lips blissfully ajar in a soft, excited  _ o _ .

“It’s a country,” she said, in a dancing sort of voice that Mako would later come to learn signified her absolute and purest love and excitement for either the subject she was discussing, the person she happened to be discussing it with, or both. “A gigantic island chain – just like New Zealand! Here, let me go get my atlas and I can show you.” Passing out of the room on speedy legs, her voice slowly diminishing in volume the farther she progressed down the hall: “Ooh! And my World Book, too!”

Together, they pored over maps that plotted great, ginormous Japan’s position in the Pacific Ocean. Nana showed Mako how to measure the distance between it and New Zealand with a ruler or, if he was lacking, his own fingertips, and his spongy brain – always having been attuned to geographic knowledge and its various apparatuses – absorbed this knowledge instantaneously. She found the entry for Japan in her  _ World Book Volume 11 _ and revealed to him photographs of willowy  _ sakura _ trees, shiny spreads of sushi and sashimi, atomic bomb mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the neon light spectacular of downtown Tokyo. Mako was particularly drawn to one  _ ukiyo-e _ print of a katana-wielding samurai in  _ ō-yoroi _ armor the color of Christmas, and upon being told by Nana, who was reading from the caption beneath the picture, that the samurai were the elite bodyguards and military officers of feudal Japan, a pin became fixed in Mako’s heart, fastening fantasy and aspiration to the organ on that day and forevermore. 

“Aah,” he murmured in his fascination.

“ _ Aah _ indeed,” Nana concurred. “The samurai were sweet-as, yeah?”

“D’they still exist?” Mako asked.

Nana gave him a particularly grandmotherly wink. “Who knows?” She plucked a stray bit of lint from his curls. “If they don’t, no one says they can’t exist again.”

Then the clothes were dry, and Nana and Mako went to pile them into the wicker laundry basket large enough for Mako, at the time, to have folded all four feet of himself into. Nana showed Mako how to fold tops and bottoms and he, with his deficient manual dexterity (a product of both his young age and as of yet undiagnosed autism) made sloppy squares of his own T-shirts, blue jeans, and shorts that she later went after him to straighten. 2:00 rolled around and Nana began to yawn catlike at the arrival of her customary early afternoon energy slump; leaving the clean laundry out on the sofa for the time being, she went into the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee and let Mako play with the filters – “Just as long as you don’t tear them,” she said. This was the beginning of Mako’s love affair with samurai, with Japan, with laundry before coffee, and with his grandmother.

In Raukokore, he never spent time in his own bedroom. Great-Uncle Harry – who he’d never met, only glimpsed photographs of in the hallways and on the mahogany bookshelves in the living room – was too much and too noisy of a presence in the room he’d slept in since infancy, his  _ wairua _ a loud, dark, talkative thing in the space between the bed and the ceiling when Mako would attempt to sleep or at the very least try to get some thinking time in during the day. As a result, Mako found himself more often than not in the living room, inhaling through his nose coffee-smelling air while Nana and Mum discussed inane things like the weather and the sheep in the kitchen, or in his grandmother’s California king bed, where he would go through her books full of interesting photographs and lie awake in the middle of the afternoon while he spun his thoughts out and around in his head like mental cotton candy. Every now and then, Nana would find him wherever he was and ask him the questions of family life – “Are you okay, moko?” “Are you hungry?” “Whatcha thinking about, eh? I swear you’re the thinkingest boy since my big brother.”

Mako was told early in his life about Great-Uncle Harry’s insanity – which closely resembled both his mother’s insanity and his own insanity that would develop as he aged and his experiences came to simultaneously trigger and mold it like clay. Great-Uncle Harry favored talking at a speed comparable to that of light itself and had a thing about disappearing at any given time to tromp through Raukokore thinking out loud about the government, sexuality, his family, and Māori theories of ecology to anyone that would listen (that is: nobody, really). He drank rum straight from the bottle and called his father’s prized dead filly Anna Pavlova his “bestest friend”, his “goodest girl”, in that soft and sad way that took him with water in his eyes out to the part of the yard where the elder Ngata had killed her with a shotgun when her right hind leg had gone out for good. Never a morning person, Harry spent the better part of his daylight hours in bed and made his living not on the family farm but out in town painting houses and doing various odd jobs for the minister, because, as he said, the unyielding structure of farm life was “an anathema” (which he pronounced with a long  _ e _ ) to his fancy-free spirit. In all honesty, Mako never thought and still doesn’t think to this day that Harry was insane – none of them are or ever were insane, save perhaps for those episodes of psychotic depression and manic rage that they experienced too cyclically and predictably to really be counted as insanity so much as symptoms of the normal, boring, relapsing illness they all share – but Great-Aunt Molly, when she’d talk about her baby brother the war vet while manning the counter at  _ Te Whare _ , would always shake her head and mutter things between anecdotes like, “Crazy old bloke,” and “What a nutter, eh?” as if she herself wasn’t also very obviously bipolar as hell and possibly the most tightly-wound of all of them.

“I think he’s still around,” is what Mako would tell Nana when she’d join him in her bed while he explored his sprawling thoughtscapes, when she’d lie on her stomach beside him and invite him to snuggle his brown body up against her side, limbs curled like silver fern fronds.

Nana would expel breath through her nostrils in the gentlest of snorts. “Of course he’s still around,” she’d say. “We’re  _ kehua _ , our family. Ghosts. We’ve never fancied leaving the earth when our time is up.” Then she’d whirl her eyes around her room with a chuckle and murmur, “I feel my daddy in this room all the time.”

Mako began to imagine himself at that moment as a ghost boy with ghost powers, levitating above the bed and speaking the language of the dead to the living. This fantasy, among countless others, occupied him for the rest of the week.

In the living room, Mum would exercise with the aid of three Richard Simmons workout tapes – always on the weekends, and sometimes, during the intensity of her manic phases, after work on Wednesdays and Fridays. Regardless of her presence or her attention, however, these tapes were cycled in and out of the VHS player just about every given day of the week due to Mako’s overriding obsession with the music and the dancing, stretching, crunching human figures featured within them. Nana, in her characteristic encyclopedic fashion, would provide him with the whole contextual background of Motown and the history of the American music while he glued himself to the television, but the truth was that Mako didn’t care for all of that. Five years older and he’d have adored to hear all about it, but at seven, his heart was in other places. His love was the sound, the rhythm, the electric piano of “Runaround Sue” and maraca-drumbeat of “All Night Long”, the peach-colored blonde woman in pink who he named Sandy and imagined to have three boyfriends and a Dalmatian that she loved above all, the wrinkled lady with a Cathy Rigby countenance and a propensity for making odd tonguey faces at the camera, the Mediterranean-looking man with beautiful floppy hair who Mako thought was shy in a way he tried his damnedest to deny, the heavyset Black woman he believed was a loving mother of twins and had an impeccable fashion sense. At night, under the watchful eyes of Great-Uncle Harry, Mako would roll around his bed thinking about Sandy and the lovely floppy-haired bloke and feel warmth spreading along his diaphragm and upward, gathering in his cheeks and reaching up to the tips of his hair. He would peel himself halfway out of his sleep shirt and fall asleep tangled up in cotton blend, and Nana would find him just like this when she came to rouse him the next morning, singing, “Open those peepers, my curly little sleeper! I want to show you something.”

She’d always want to show him something – a shiny golden chrysalis in the kauri tree near the porch, the past year’s kids jumping around like heated popcorn kernels in the goat pen, a fifteen-pound coffee table book she’d recently got in the mail from the United States, her coin money that was so old it wasn’t even being produced by the Royal Canadian Mint anymore. Mako, who so loved the world at the time, was always ready to be shown these things. Waking up was no trouble in the earliest of those days.

In the January of 1994, the goats began to breed. For one-hundred and fifty-three days, Mako passed out of his summer T-shirts and jandals and into his winter Swanndri and gumboots while he watched Bing Crosby the Saanen expand hilariously in the middle until her udder was the size of his head and she could only waddle sadly around the yard in slow, stumbling steps. By the time Tina Turner was born – her mother’s creamy white color in majority, yet speckled black over her back and face just like her father Prince – he was utterly taken by the miracle of pregnancy, the delightful parasitism of it, and he would talk on and on about this at dinner while gorging on seasoned potato wedges and his Mum’s deliciously thin cuts of pork.

“How does it happen?” he’d ask around a gross, impolite mouthful of potato. “How do they start off  _ this big _ –” With this, he held up the tiniest sliver of pork on his plate. “And turn into goats? How come their mums don’t explode? Where do their guts go?”

“Oh, they’re built that way, hon,” Nana would reply – answering all of his questions at once in the masterful way she had perfected in the decades before his birth. 

“Girls –  _ female _ animals, including humans – have these pouches right  _ here _ .” Mum dropped her fork momentarily to her plate so that she could indicate with both index fingers her lower abdomen. “They’re like, extra-strength balloons specially built to carry babies while they grow big and strong enough to be born.”

“Like kangaroos?” Mako asked, entranced by the image of Sandy the Dalmatian-lover with a thick flap of skin over her stomach. Mum made a sharp noise of amusement.

“No, no, they’re  _ inside _ the body.” Sandy’s flap disappeared, and Mum nodded briefly in Mako’s direction. “ _ You _ were in one of those, once upon a time. Your balloon was so  _ big _ – full of amniotic fluid, the doctor said, just  _ lots _ of cushioning – but you were born pretty normal-sized.”

Mako grinned at this, at his outsized prenatal balloon and whatever wonderful things it happened to say about him as a person. “Did I push your guts around?”

Mum, to his surprise, nodded her head. “Of course you did,” she said. “Otherwise there wouldn’t have been enough room for your stinkin’ ass.”

This set Mako ablaze with the desire to give birth. He wanted a womb of his own, wanted the unthinkable rearrangement of his own insides and the stretching of his skin until dark lines rippled across his belly like they did Mum’s, which he often saw when his head would ache on the weekends and she’d pull her shirt up and have him lay his noggin down on her full, quietly squiggling stomach. He wanted to produce a smaller living version of himself with his complexion and Sandy’s eyes and the floppy-haired man’s lovely floppy hair – and because he wanted this (and he wanted this badly), he asked, “Do boys have them?”

Mum impaled a potato wedge with her fork. “Have what?”

“The balloons?”

“Oh, no,” Mum replied with her mouth somewhat full. A look of wry satisfaction came over her face. “Boys have penises.”

Mako knew what those were. He had the sudden urge to inspect his own for parturient capabilities, but instead of doing this, he furthered his line of questioning: “Can they make babies, too?”

Ambiguously, Mum and Nana began to laugh – short, snorting little noises that they rushed to cover up with their cloth napkins and sips of their ice water. Mum shook her head for one long, speechless moment before she gave a proper answer – “No, baby, no. Boys definitely  _ take part _ in making babies, but they can’t give birth, no.”

Mako’s heart migrated abruptly to the floor of his stomach. “Why not?”

This time Nana chimed in. “We’re just not built like that.”

This failed to satisfy. Again, Mako pressed – “Why not?”

Nana and Mum exchanged curious, vaguely helpless looks across the table. In retrospect, Mako would become aware that a question like his didn’t have an answer that didn’t sprawl ever outward and dive deep into the realms of evolutionary biology, religion, philosophy, and gender studies, but then – halfway into his eighth year and wanting nothing more than to both understand and subvert the laws of nature – he’d survived the confusion of his days believing that if he knew the way things worked, he could change everything about them. That’s why he was thrilled when Mum arrived home from Tauranga one afternoon with a thick, square-shaped book called  _ The Human Body _ that she handed to him with the supremely loving utterance of, “I thought you might like this,” and Mako with his fingers flipping through the detailed anatomical illustrations and sharp, technical descriptions of physiological processes knew, just knew, that he’d be able to rebuild himself like a mad scientist with the help of this tome. One day, with all his knowing, he would give birth, or better – he’d endow other boys like him with the capability to do so as well. 

Nana told him that, for adults, this was called being a doctor – “Or, I guess a bit more accurately, a surgeon.” At that moment, Mako decided that this is what he’d wanted to do with his life, just as his mother had decided when she was his age, petting the goats and sheep through their killer labor pangs.

Bing Crosby passed away a week into Tina Turner’s life. Nana and Mako found her motionless in the goat pen one morning after five days of incomprehensible behavior brought about, Nana speculated, by infection and eventual sepsis. Nana sent Mako inside the house to read about infections in his  _ Human Body  _ book while she wrapped Bing’s corpse in an old blanket and carried her to the informal graveyard behind the house, where all their dead animals resided and the grass grew thick and pretty. Hours later, covered in dirt and sweat, she sat on her knees in the goat pen and showed Mako how to milk Janet Jackson – who had just given birth to Bruce Springsteen – so that they could feed Tina Turner with a baby bottle for the next ten months.

“This is what mothers do,” she said, watching patiently as Mako held Tina Turner’s Oreo-colored head in his hand and guided the nipple of the baby bottle into her mouth. She didn’t move when Tina jerked her head from side to side and Mako whined at the spill of milk over his bare knees, nor did she intervene when the two of them fought with each other for supremacy of the whole feeding experience; she just let them find their groove and said, once Tina Turner finally began to suckle at an even clip and Mako had settled down enough to simply watch her, transfixed, as she hungrily gulped down mouthful after mouthful, “After birth, there is  _ always _ milk.”

Mako, an aspiring mother and surgeon, could not help but adore this sentiment. Tina Turner, with her pale goaty eyes half-closed as she nursed, didn’t seem to mind it much either.

They did this, Mako and Tina Turner, three to four times a day for the following three-hundred days. After breakfast, after lunch, and in the breathtaking twilight hour after dinner, Mako would head outside with a microwaved bottle in hand and arrive at the goat pen to find Tina Turner bouncing around in sheer anticipation of his presence, sometimes even bleating a little if her hunger or her love was so serious. Sitting cross-legged in the grass, he’d gather her into his lap and struggle with her for five minutes or so before she went slack with bliss and just drank, blinking affectionately at him like a dog, like his very favorite creature in the world. He would blink back, occasionally lowering his face into her neck fur to nuzzle and even kiss, and if it was a particularly nippy day in June or July, Nana would let him bring Tina inside with him after feeding, where they’d sit around in the living room watching Richard Simmons’  _ Dance Your Pants Off!  _ and reading excerpts from  _ The Human Body _ together.

Tina Turner was Mako’s “bestest friend” and his “goodest girl”, with the clear and perhaps slightly heartbreaking exception of Nana Victoria herself. This did not strike him as odd for the longest time.

He and Mum had been living in Raukokore for six months when Nana said to him one morning over hash browns, “I’m going to take you out shepherding today.” Mako didn’t know what shepherding meant, but he was excited nearly out of his wits. 

After washing the dishes and filling an old knapsack with various snack foods, books, cassette tapes, and a Walkman borrowed from and, in time, never returned to Great-Aunt Molly, Nana took Mako out to the tiny stable in which they kept Buddy Holly – a pinto mare that had once been Rui’s horse, the one she’d learned to ride on – and demonstrated for him the whole five-minute procedure of saddling and bridling the old girl. She helped him climb up into the very front of the saddle before throwing herself up onto the horse’s back behind him – so physically dexterous in her sinewy old age it damn near made Mako swoon – then, instructing him to grip her wrists which themselves gripped Buddy’s reins, rode them over to the sheep pen, where Peggy Lee the Australian Shepherd waited with her tail in the air and her ears perked toward the sky.

When the sheep milled out of the pen, led by Peggy and watched over by Nana, Mako imagined them as dusty clouds floating across a pale green sky. As pale chromosomal bits migrating to the axis of the cell in anaphase. An individual sheep didn’t move very fast at all, but as a flock of twenty, they seemed downright zippy trekking out of the farm and up the road toward the hills, seemed driven and purposeful as he and Nana rode behind them on Buddy Holly while Peggy Lee paced back and forth from the front to the rear of the herd and around again, nipping at heels when necessary. Nana sang to them all as they picked their way up to the shaggiest, greenest hillside two miles from the house.

“ _ You go to my head… and you linger like a haunting refrain… and I find you spinning ‘round in my brain… like the bubbles in a glass of champagne _ …”

The sheep grazed for two hours under white mid-July sunlight. Nana kept Mako on Buddy Holly’s back for about a fourth of that time, walking attentively alongside the horse while he got the feel for the reins and for the powerful russet-and-white body between his legs. In a year, she would use the money gained selling their homemade goat’s milk and cheese to buy him a palomino filly of his own, and he would ride at her side rather than in her saddle on their trips up into the hills, would spend his time feeding Madonna – his insanely appropriate name for his cream-colored, headstrong beauty – thick slices of his apples and their oxidized cores while he and Nana listened to old jazz on the Walkman and watched the sheep go to town on the Raukokore grass. 

This was life in the Bay of Plenty. In it, Mako experienced an almost overwhelming love of setting – the kind which he’d either been too young or merely incapable of experiencing in Wellington, which had always been like a small town in nature considering the close-togetherness of everything and everybody, the too-little degrees of separation between any given person, but carried with it the paralyzing, excruciating complexity of big city life in its sprawl and its concrete and its volume. Of course, he hadn’t figured all this out for himself at the age of eight and nine. All he’d known was that Wellington was the place he went to on a rickety, diesel-smelling train to be bossed around by his brother and all but ignored by his father every other weekend, after which he’d come back to Raukokore and bathe in the warm pool of knowledge and farming and full-bodied fun provided to him by Nana Victoria. Raukokore was like an ocean over which the sky was so blue, so violently chrysocolla, that the horrifying nature of its depths did not reveal itself until the deep and unknown and irrelevant miles beneath its surface that Mako simply chose not to explore. Almost every darkness and terror in this sea was drowned out by sheer goodness. When, for example, he dreamed of flying through space being pursued by a transparent man with jagged fingernails, he’d just crawl into bed with Nana and let her tell him good stories about Russian ballerinas and her silly, bickering siblings in their long lost young age. When the Short twins at school strained Mako’s patience with their fund of dirty jokes and the important reproductive information they so loved to share, or brawled with him on the school bus when he dared to sit in the very last seat, he simply prayed for the good fortune of finally getting kicked off the bus so that he could ride his bike home as he wished and consort with all of his good friends as he rode: the towering kauri tree before the bridge, the sharp curve in the road coming down from the second hill, the gust of wind that tickled him in the late winter, every other stop sign, the abandoned Ford just up the road from the farm, the sun. At school, good Friday afternoons would be spent cleaning the desks with shaving cream – pushing small hands through the foamy mass of white and grinding it into the dark wood until the lead marks and crayon drawings came away – and they’d all get good grades for their work, stars next to their names on the whiteboard. Good neighbors tapped on the screen door to share with Nana good pavlova, and Mako would bring bits of its crust to his good girl Tina Turner that she’d gobble up in circular, indulgent chomping motions. On the weekends, he’d stand at the kitchen counter and let himself be used as Nana’s good – no, her best human instrument while she cooked, while she seasoned her good lamb’s meat and cut potatoes in good wedges and tossed salad with her good dressing – “Hold the knife like that,” she’d say to him. “That’s enough salt.” “Don’t slice that  _ too _ thin, baby.” “Very  _ good _ ,” and she’d kiss him directly on the top of his head. All of this goodness seemed to stem directly from the green fabric of Raukokore, which itself felt as though it was entirely the realm of Nana, as though it belonged to her, as though one day she’d thought it up and then it existed fully-formed in her grassy, hilly, beach-bordered vision. The air only tasted so sweet because she’d arranged for it to. When the breeze carried itself in its own gusty arms through Mako’s bedroom window, it was her doing. She made the clock turn its hands around and the Raukokore earth change its gown as the seasons progressed. She was powerful – infinite, even – and Mako loved her as he loved his adopted home, his tree roots that grew so deeply into it.

The weekend after he’d turned ten – after he’d woken up with balloons on his bed and eaten enough German chocolate cake for breakfast to have him happily vomiting all over his desk at school, after he’d received three new books and a pretty red parka and danced with Nana to the sounds of ‘60s surf rock in the living room – Cher the black sheep was hit by Nelson Whitu’s Chevy Silverado at 3:28 on a Sunday morning. Mako woke up three hours later, ready to greet the new day and all of its goodness, and went outside to find one of his favorite ewes (he adored her in her unusual darkness) a mess of shining pink viscera and nearly black blood rotting and pooling in the middle of the road. Her organs – formerly, in Mako’s head, benign peach- and salmon-colored illustrations in his anatomy textbook – were then fly-covered roseate blobs of stolen capability, simultaneously engorged and deflated from both trauma and exposure to the air and running like solid water out of the open gash that nearly split Cher in half. Her wholesome amber eyes with their strange rectangular pupils sat askew in her head and were themselves the newfound havens of flies the size of horses, buzzing around and resting atop those vitreous orbs, feeling them with filamentary legs, laying eggs in them. She had a stillness about her unlike any other stillness – unlike inert grass, unlike the stability of the house, unlike the hills which never moved yet were always filled with somethingness – she simply was. A mere thing. A nothing.

In that moment, Mako was brought back to his experience years earlier with Bing Crosby. He’d only seen her corpse from a distance before Nana had begun to shoo him away, out of the goat pen and off in the direction of the house. This time, however – alone in the road, alone in his horror – he saw Cher in her death with an astounding proximity and clarity that he as a child had never prepared himself for in the way that adults did, their free time between work, sex, and sleep spent talking to themselves about the inevitable day when tragedy would strike again, how would they handle it and what would they do. Mako, on the other hand – decidedly not an adult – was shell-shocked. He wanted to run away. He’d been told about the finality of death in a way he’d believed he’d understood and been okay with – yes, the dead stay dead; no, the dead don’t come back – but Nana talked to her father on a daily basis and Great-Uncle Harry, for all intents and purposes, still lived in their house, so clearly there were exceptions. Clearly death wasn’t all that final. Had Cher merely not made the cut? Had she not been special enough? Bing Crosby, too, even after she’d literally created life itself? What made the difference?

Questions that had no answers.

Mako – apparently old enough for loss by that time – helped Nana clean Cher’s savaged body out of the street and carefully arrange the pieces of her in the pit they dug in the animals’ graveyard. He heated water to near-boiling in the backyard’s huge steel tub before climbing in to scrub every bit of blood and grime from his skin. He never touched  _ The Human Body _ again, and no more did he talk of becoming a surgeon or a doctor. For the first time, a terror emerged into his world that Nana could not snuff out with goodness, no matter how much she explained the joyful necessity of endings or hugged him to her chest when he slept in her bed at night.

The world began to fracture. It had always made minimal sense, to be sure – especially to a mind like Mako’s, which often had to force contradictions and conundrums in twisted, unnatural shapes into its own prescribed structures to keep from simply falling apart (and it did, from time to time) – but after the death of Cher the black sheep, his autistic tendency to classify, stratify, and code warred against the commonplace confusion of the world with unprecedented fervor. When Nana drove to Waihau Bay to get fresh lamb’s meat because she refused to kill her own perfectly healthy animals, Mako found himself pretzel-shaped with agitation, with quiet rage, at this almost-hypocrisy. Why did they eat sheep at all if this eating necessitated the death of said sheep? What made the nameless sheep of Waihau Bay lesser than Cher, who was lesser than Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, and Elvis Presley, who still baaed and milled about in the farmyard and lived, who’d never been killed by human hubris? When cockroaches got into the house and were promptly sprayed into oblivion with Raid and hairspray by Mum, Mako questioned his overriding fear of these once-living creatures. Were they, in their disgusting creepy-crawliness, made to inspire cowardly and homicidal urges in others? Was their existence purposeful in this way? Were they teleological? When he got sick in the summertime and was kept home from school, Mako didn’t understand why this minor ailment of his didn’t take him out of his body and out of his life the way Great-Uncle Harry’s long-ago sickness did, and he followed Nana around the yard in his sleep clothes and jandals while she fed the animals and groomed the horses and loaded the laundry and patched the fence, asking her questions, trying to figure it out –

“Am I going to die?”

“Someday, yes.”

“But am I going to die  _ now _ , because I’m sick?”

“Mako, you just have a cold. I doubt that will kill you.”

“Why not?”

“Colds aren’t very serious, hon. They’re little sicknesses.”

“But getting sick kills you.”

“Only if it’s serious enough.”

“Who decides who gets the  _ little _ sicknesses and the  _ serious  _ sicknesses?”

“Nobody, really. I mean, your life choices sometimes have something to do with it – if you eat badly and drink lots of alcohol, you’re more likely to get seriously sick – but a lot of it is just random. Nobody decides who gets sick and how.”

“Why not?”

“What do you mean, why not?”

“I mean _why?_ _Why_ is it random?”

“That’s just the way it is.”

“But who decides the way it is?”

“ _ Nobody _ , baby. Things are as they are.”

At this, Mako threw himself down onto the ground and wrapped his arms around his knees, shaking his head again and again because it didn’t make sense – it didn’t make sense! Nana tried to lift him up by his biceps, cooing, “What’s wrong, moko? Come on, let’s go inside,” but he wouldn’t have it – just shoved his flushed, snotty face into the dirt and yelled until his throat burned raw. It didn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense! It probably never would.

Of course, it wasn’t in Nana’s policy to just walk away from a crisis, but she had a seventy year old wisdom about her that told her when things simply could not be helped. Rather than touching Mako, attempting to drag him into the house through sheer brute force or imposing the ferocity of her own calmness onto him, she sat with her grandson in the grass and saw him through his meltdown, unplaiting and replaiting her hair while he cried and opening her arms to him when he finally tired enough to enter them.

“Shh,” she said, carding her fingers through the wildness of his curls and not minding at all the smear of mucus and tears and dirt across the front of her T-shirt. “You’re okay, baby.”

“No, I’m not,” Mako whimpered.

“No?” Nana cupped a hand at the back of his neck. “What’s the matter?”

Blood, wool, and asphalt spun around Mako’s head. Great-Uncle Harry’s face smiling out from the sepia-toned photograph of him and a nineteen year old Nana on the bookshelf. The flying man with the jagged fingernails and illustrations of the heart’s four chambers. Mako’s feeling sometimes that his own four chambers were going to break down sooner rather than later.

He was so tired, and so confused.

“I don’t know,” he replied, even though he did.

“Is this about Cher?” Nana asked, knowing as she always did the contents of his heart, and because it was and it wasn’t – because it was really so much bigger than just Cher – Mako simply pressed his face into her bosom and made a pitiful noise that could have and did mean anything, everything. 

He was half-carried off to bed, tucked in with the stuffed shark he hadn’t so much as looked at since he was eight, and when Mum arrived home five hours later, peeked into her mother’s bedroom, and found Mako fast asleep at six in the afternoon, she sighed and said in her perfect sarcastic voice, “Exciting days when we’re sick, eh?”

Nana laughed, brushing a hand along her daughter’s back as she passed behind her down the hallway. “You have  _ no _ idea.”

#    
  
  
  



	9. 09

#  _ 9 _

Two weeks before Christmas, Mako gets the last of his December shopping done. His Thursday afternoon lunch break, he spends rushing to and from the Canal Place mall to pick up the incredibly dainty unicorn pendant and chain he’d picked out for Kory the week before and a supremely stupid, supremely gay engagementesque ring for Jem (which he plans to give to him for his birthday on the sixteenth along with a speech composed in the Notes app on his phone that runs the gamut from humorous to deceptively noncommittal to bawling his eyes out sincere and will, in all likelihood, mean something serious but not that serious for their relationship). After work, on his way to pick Kory up from ballet practice, he throws the gifts in their nondescript plastic bags on the floor of the backseat and stops at the Starbucks across the street from the studio to grab a couple of the strawberry-flavored Frapps they both love so much. When he finally shoulders his way into the New Orleans School of Ballet, there isn’t a student nor a parent to be seen – only Alyssa, clad in long yoga pants and standing at the barre with her smartphone.

“They dressing out?” Mako asks, watching somewhat guiltily when Alyssa jumps in half-surprise at his presence.

“Yeah,” she says with a throaty, unintentionally sexy little laugh. Turning to face Mako with her left leg turned out, foot grasping at the inside of her right knee, she tears her eyes away from her Android to give him the somewhat bemused and tired mid-afternoon smile of a teacher. “We ran a bit over time today.”

“That’s alright,” Mako drawls, moving on light, careful feet to stand next to Alyssa in all his First World glory – Starbucks in his hands and Patagonia on his back. When he accidentally scuffs the floor with the heel of his Doc Marten, he shoots her a sheepish, apologetic look from beneath half-lidded eyes. “Sorry.”

Alyssa waves her hand dismissively. “Don’t worry about it. The kids do so much worse.”

For upwards of two minutes, the two of them simply stand around in front of the floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall mirror, Mako sipping at his Frappuccino, Alyssa tapping out text messages on her Motorola. There’s something quietly, remarkably twenty-first century about it, Mako thinks, trying not very hard to remember the time before he bought his first smartphone and his whole life became subsumed in a six-inch rectangle of plastic and Gorilla Glass, when the silliest thing he ever drank was twist-top champagne or fruity “Tiki” cocktails at Havana on Wigan Street in Wellington. He’s not so old or fussbudgety as to have become jaded about it – the passing of a so-called “simpler” or “better” time – but his current existence feels so far away from his late ‘90s/early 2000s one in this particular moment that he can’t help but feel wistful as he noiselessly slurps pale pink coffee drink through a Starbucks-green straw and watches Alyssa scroll through blue raspberry text message bubbles in his peripheral vision.

Then, midway through his internal reminiscence of the time in 2008 when he and Jem planned their road trip to Karekare using, wait for it, a paper map, Alyssa says, apropos of nothing, “You and Kora are from Australia, right?”

Silently bridling a bit at the common yet no less irritating mistake, Mako shakes his head. “New Zealand.”

“ _ New Zealand _ . Right.” Alyssa’s wordless sorry is all in her eyes. “I always wonder, then feel like a complete idiot when I can’t remember.”

Mako quirks an eyebrow at her. “You wonder about this often?”

“Well, yeah.” Alyssa has a distinctly, almost adorably simian look about her – most evident in the out-jutting roundness of her ears and her attractive button nose – that is so endearingly accentuated when she turns a smile on Mako, raising the prominent pale apples of her cheeks and thus pushing her ears even further outward and upward. “I  _ do _ see Kora twice a week every week, don’t I?”

“That’s true,” Mako concedes. Feeling awkward, he doesn’t say anything more – just smiles at Alyssa, at this woman he sees more frequently on a week-to-week basis than he does most of his friends yet knows nearly nothing about.

He knows she’s engaged. He knows she doesn’t only teach ballet, that she’s not some tragic career-ending accident that culminated in a those-who-can’t-do-teach state of being; she performs in New Orleans, Houston, and occasionally even Chicago and New York from time to time. He knows that she lives out in Jefferson, thanks to that one time Kory left her pointe shoes in the locker room and he was compelled to drive out to retrieve them from Alyssa’s home. He knows these things and not much else, and for an incredibly sensitive, incredibly fourteen year old moment, this is an exceptionally sad fact of his life.

Then Alyssa asks, “Can I ask you a question?” and the sadness dissipates as if a window has been opened upon it, letting fresh air and other things in to mingle.

Mako nods his head with a miniscule circling motion of the chin. “Sure.”

“I hope this isn’t too probing, and if it is, feel free to not answer.” Having offered this preface, Alyssa’s expression becomes suddenly bashful, reserved, reminding Mako again of the crazily liminal nature of their relationship as teacher and parent. Half-avoiding Mako’s eyes, Alyssa says, “Kora doesn’t ever talk about having a… well, having a mom, and it’s always you or her grandmother coming to pick her up, so I was curious about–”

“About what happened to her mum,” Mako finishes with a knowing, marginally self-satisfied smile. 

Alyssa’s face seems to open right up like some sort of daylily when it becomes apparent that he’s playing along. “Exactly,” she says. “And, I guess, if that has anything to do with why you ended up moving to the United States.”

“Oh,  _ God _ no,” is Mako’s kneejerk answer, but as soon as the words pass out of his mouth, he is rethinking them, screwing his face up in a triangular expression of uncertainty. “Well… on paper, I moved to New Orleans because of a job offer, but in reality it probably had much more to do with the fact that New Zealand was just so  _ sad _ for me. It was like… suffocating me, I needed to get away from it. Kory’s mum was sort of part of why.”

Alyssa blinks sympathetically at him. “Did she die?”

Mako can’t help it – he bursts into laughter. Sputtering, snorting, ugly laughter – the kind that puts an expression of alarm and surprise on Alyssa’s face. He imagines his life being so Academy Award-winning drama film tragic, imagines Aroha having died of something ridiculously Victorian like consumption or, even better, having been killed in a catastrophic car crash that miraculously spared both him and their daughter’s lives, and it’s all both so probable and so theatrical that it twists his funny bone hard. 

He says, “Aroha didn’t want a child, so we separated when Kory was a toddler.” Then, trying to rein in his stupid giggling a little more successfully, “She couldn’t be farther from death, I’m afraid.”

“Oh.” Alyssa’s eyes, blown out to the circumferences of glass Coke bottles, flicker from Mako to the floor and back in her surprise. “Oh, wow, I. Had no idea.”

Mako shakes his head. “Most people find it hard to believe when I tell them.”

“Well…  _ yeah _ .” Alyssa shifts her weight from her left leg to her right so that she’s leaning that much more into Mako’s space, almost conspiratorially but more curiously than anything else. “It’s just…” she says. “You’d think Kora needed a mother in her life, right? I mean, do you ever worry about that?”

Before Mako can even think about answering, there is the sound of girlish giggling from the direction of the locker room and Kory and a classmate – Mako believes her name is Deniz – are emerging into the studio proper, clad in their street clothes and looking appropriately exhausted from class. It’s one of those days, Mako realizes with unexpressed delight, when Kory zeroes in on him and, with not a second of hesitation, makes a closemouthed noise of pure excitement and comes bounding across the room with her arms flung open – arms that she proceeds to throw around him as soon as their bodies collide, her sweaty, unkempt head nestled against his fleece-insulated chest.

He adores these days. Can’t get enough of them. In his more self-reflective moments, it is fantastically clear to him how simultaneously weird and wonderful this is – this near-grotesque transformation of his, fourteen and a half years in the making, into a person who is pleased by almost nothing more than he is by his own child’s frank and unalloyed affection; into a person with a child, period; into one-hundred percent fatherly gelatin and sweet molasses, a being that sometimes feels faraway and foreign to him in light of the complex, crazy, and kind of fucked up cosmos of his life. Kory somehow makes the reconciliation of these separate parts of himself not only possible, but unspeakably delightful as well. This is another thing that he adores, that he can’t get quite enough of.

“What’s up, fish?” Mako asks, hugging Kory as best as he’s able to with two Frappuccinos in his hands. “I got you Starbucks. Did you have a good day?”

“Yes!” Kory rocks her body from side to side against his, attempting to tug him along for the sway and mostly failing at it, thanks to his height, weight, and strength advantage over her. When she finally pulls away, sunniest of smiles on her face, she immediately reaches for her Frapp and takes from it a long, thirsty drag, asking around her straw, “Have you been waiting long?”

“Not too.” Mako gives Alyssa, who is watching them with the happily mystified look she always seems to be giving them when they’re together (as if it is just too magical to witness a father and daughter as crazy about each other as they happen to be), a quick nod. “Alyssa’s good company, anyway.”

“Wow,” Alyssa croons, her monkey face all bloomy once more. “Thanks.” 

Mako smiles a silent you’re welcome, watches Kora give both her classmate and her teacher remarkably squeezy hugs in goodbye, then trails his daughter out of the studio and over to the Jetta parked across the street, mouth locked in a pleasant, safe, half-smirking rictus around his straw all the while. It is only after he and Kora are in the car that he frees his mouth to speak again.

“Tell me about your day,” he says. This time, when Kora lunges for his phone and starts to trawl through his Spotify for something to listen to, he doesn’t move – is simply too happy to see her – to stop her.

“Wow, okay, ummm…” Kory sticks her tongue out of the side of her mouth in thought, dragging her thumb along his iPhone’s greasy touchscreen. “Have I told you about my world geography teacher yet? He’s really mean and sarcastic and he assigned that mad crazy project as a joke one time, the one where we were supposed to build the Alsace-Lorraine to scale with Legos?”

The percussive opening chords of an Amy Winehouse ballad abruptly begin to stream from the Jetta’s old, tinny speakers. Breathing a silent sigh of relief at Kory’s fantastically not awful song choice, Mako pulls the car out off the curb and proceeds northeast on Adams Street, saying, “Yeah, I remember him. He’s the one you think is on meth, right?”

“No, that’s my physical science teacher, Ms. Meaders.” Kory drops his phone into the single free cup-holder and kicks her sneakered feet up onto the dashboard, just like she’s not supposed to and just like Mako has scolded her for several times. “This is Mr. Katz. This morning he told me I was his favorite student.”

Pride and alarm pools in Mako’s gut. Feeling stupid for his distress, he tries for a nice, neutral reply: “Why?”

Kory narrows her eyes across the center console. “What do you mean, ‘ _ why _ ’? Because I’m an awesome student and person in general.” She’s inherited her sense of joking narcissism from her father, clearly.

“Well,  _ duh _ , Kory, I know that.” Mako turns away from the road for a split second to give her a soft, rounded look of sorry-not-sorry sort of apology. “I’m just curious. If this guy’s such a dickhead, excuse my French, why would he compliment you? And so personally? His ‘ _ favorite student _ ’? What?”

“Oh, Daddy…” Kory reaches over to pat Mako’s bearded jaw, adorably patronizing in that way only adolescents can be to their elders. “Don’t you worry about me. I assure you there is a complete absence of funny business going on.”

“There better be…” Mako cuts his eyes over at Kory’s ankles, crossed over each other against the passenger airbag. “Put your feet down. If we get in an accident, your poor legs’ll  _ snap _ –” He snaps the fingers of his left hand for emphasis. “Just like that, like toothpicks.”

“You’re a good driver, though,” Kory protests, just this shy of whiny. She lowers her feet to the ground regardless.

“How do you know that? How do you even have a standard for good driving?”

“You’re not Nana,” Kory says, sending them both into momentary fits of knowing, slightly horrified laughter. “I swear to God, I feel like I’m taking my life into my own hands every time I get in a car with her behind the wheel.”

“She’s just an Aries, baby.” Mako makes a crumpled paper face at the sound system. “Also, completely unrelated, what are you even  _ doing _ listening to Amy Winehouse? Homegirl is straight-up talking about having adulterous relations with other men, semi-explicit descriptions of sexual congress...”

“Oh my God! You say worse things to me on a daily basis!” A beat, then Kory changes her somewhat outraged tone and expression to something less so, something more levelheaded. “Well, maybe not directly to me, but definitely where I can hear.”

“What are you talking about?” Mako asks, already laughing despite truly having no clue what Kory could possibly say in response. “What’s the last Amy Winehouse-comparable thing you’ve heard me say?”

Kory takes a moment or so to visibly sift through her memory, peering thoughtfully through the passenger side window at the gray, damp spread of New Orleans in December. Then, with a coupled candor and smugness that tickles Mako to his core, she says, “There was that time last week where you were talking about that guy you used to date when I was like, seven – Cassidy? – to make Jem jealous, I think. What did you say, you said, you said–” She claps her hands over her mouth and makes a strange noise somewhere halfway between a snort and a hiss. “I can’t even say it, it’s so embarrassing.”

“You better spit it out, girl, or I’m completely non-seriously going to ground you for a month,” Mako threatens.

Kory turns to him with positively planetary eyes, not breathing for all of three seconds, just floating there in her seat – taut and delicate and filled with frozen air in the manner of a bubblegum balloon moments before it’s too full to hold its shape any longer – then says, in a low sort of undertone that makes the utterance just that much more hysterical, “You said, I quote, ‘ _ I was so shocked and turned on, my soul flew out of my mother-effing body _ .’”

She blinks. “You said, ‘ _ My soul went straight to God _ .’” 

When Mako releases a howl of laughter into the dashboard that is as mortified as it is thoroughly amused, Kory’s expression breaks down into nervous and pleased mirth as well, the girl pressing her face into her hands and wagging it back and forth as she cries, “I’m glad you think traumatizing me is so funny! I always needed to know about your sex life, thank you!”

“Oh my God…” Thumbing a pinch of moisture out of his eyes, Mako merges the Jetta onto I-10 and makes a quiet noise of satisfaction when Amy gives way to classic Al Green. “I actually can’t believe you heard that conversation.”

“You were having it in the kitchen, which I think is a communal room,” Kory points out. She slurps up the remaining dregs from her Frappuccino and then tucks the drained cup between her thighs, exchanging it for her phone, which she immediately sets to unlocking and dives into to check any one of her many social media accounts.

In the ensuing brief, candy-colored silence, Mako is made to remember the exact exchange that Kory overheard, made to remember sculpting ground beef patties with Jem and openly, if somewhat jokingly, delving into the more pleasurable details of his past relationship with the Australian glassblower he hasn’t seen for about seven years now, save for a handful of split-second occasions when he’s happened to pass by Cassidy’s shop on Magazine and walked a few steps faster past the storefront so as not to be seen, or moments when he’s thought he’s spotted some beautiful, burly blond walking through the grocery store or lingering in front of a coffeehouse in Mid-City and has had to skip half of his grocery list and decide that no, he actually doesn’t want his java fix for the day in order to avoid some awkward, overwrought reunion he knew would likely short-circuit his will to live. He recalls this conversation with Jem – the dreamy eyes he’d so deliberately put on, the affected cock of his left hip heavenward, his voice full of sighs when he spoke of Cassidy’s intoxicating full-bodied heaviness, of his girth, the way he’d kiss him in the shadow of Bayou St. John when they’d take his perfect, perfect Retriever out for walks at two in the morning after an hour or so of tender, then rough, then tender again  _ perfect, perfect  _ lovemaking – and he reflects that in truth, there has always been an element of shit-taking and intentionally breached skin to their relationship. Aside from talking, which is pretty much the cornerstone of their relationship, getting on each other’s nerves is arguably his and Jem’s favorite and most frequent shared activity. They’ve long had a policy of mutual teasing, of inappropriate honesty, of speaking about Tatum and Aroha and Cassidy because Jem, in his perfect understanding and unconditional love for Mako, has always professed to being okay with hearing about Mako’s romantic entanglements from the time before they finally grew up enough to call each other boyfriends – but did Mako go too far this time? Did he shoot for simple ribbing and rocket way past into intentionally provoking Jem’s jealousy? Kory seems to think so and, her age aside, he’s made a point to trust her on things like this – because she’s a girl, because her heart is big, because she’s so smart and so sweet it steals his breath sometimes. 

He feels, far from the first time today, idiotic enough to just die.

“Kora Mae,” he says.

“Daddy,” she replies without looking up from her phone.

Mako gazes half-blind at the highway before him, contacts uncomfortably dry upon his eyeballs, anxiety blooming like a dark flower in his gut. “Do you think I’m a good person?”

Kory’s face, previously a mask glazed over with faint amusement and dim interest in whatever it is she’s looking at, instantly awakens with confusion and concern. She turns to look at her father – a gesture he is only able to return after slowing the car to a stop in the standstill of five o’clock traffic – and says with a furrowed brow and piercing eyes, “What are you talking about? Why?”

Mako shakes his head. “Nothing.” He retrieves his Frappuccino from his cup-holder and sticks the straw in his mouth again. “I’m jus’ bein’ weird, s’nothing.”

For long moments mediated by the soul music filling the car’s interior like silky clouds of invisible coffee air, father and daughter don’t speak. Mako stares at the bumper sticker on the dented, blue station wagon in front of him:  _ TEAM CHRISTIAN _ in a near-illegible Gothic-type font alongside a cartoony white dove wearing sunglasses, while Kory returns her attention to her smartphone, her expression unreadable. When Al Green ends and Prince takes over with “Little Red Corvette” – the perfect synth-heavy, angsty soundtrack to Mako’s self-flagellating inner monologue – Kory’s voice comes to him from her side of the car, saying, “I think you’re great.”

Mako wants to close his eyes, but traffic has just begun to move once more. He settles for a hard blink. “Thank you, baby.”

“I mean it.” Kory stretches her arm over to squeeze her hand around the inside of Mako’s right elbow, where he is both tickled and soothed. “I mean, I don’t know what kind of stupid edgy things you’re thinking about right now or why, but you’re like the best person ever as far as I’m concerned.”

“I can’t possibly bring myself to believe that,” Mako utters with a laugh.

“Unacceptable!” Kory shakes an emphatic fist at the ceiling, tossing her head back and forth in mock-mock-refusal, the sable waves of her hair flying through the air like kite-tails. “Believe it! Believe it!”

Mako takes Kory’s hand in his and squeezes it. “I love you.”

Kory gives Mako’s hand a squeeze in turn. “I love you more.”

Shaking his head, his voice rimmed with melted sugar and candied fruit: “Not possible.”

Leaning over to smush her forehead against Mako’s right shoulder: “ _ Way _ possible.”

When they get home, Kory snuggles her long-limbed body into his for five sweat-slick minutes on the couch – face tucked into the juncture of his neck and shoulder, cotton-clad legs sprawled haphazard across his lap – before tiredly ascending the stairs to take her post-ballet shower. During the cuddle sesh, while some milquetoast Canadian murder mystery plays at half-volume on the tube, Mako holds Kory the way he would when she was six, when they first moved here, when they were both aliens but she, with that strange spongelike wisdom and open-hearted love of hers that could only have come with early life, was so much better at acclimating than he was, at speaking with a Cajun-Creole lilt and gobbling up just about anything dusted with Tony Chachere’s as if it was the height of gastronomic art.

“Aw, sha,” she’d say whenever she saw someone walking their dog down the busted and blistered street or a picture of some painfully adorable animal infant, an elephant calf or a duckling or two.

“Gimme bookoo,” in the moments when Mako would pour her favorite cereal (Rice Crispies) into her favorite bowl (the yellow one with the sweatered bunny in the bottom) for breakfast.

“Can we make groceries soon?” in the event that the house ran out of her beloved oatmeal cookies or the oodles of fruit juice all members of the Gehringer-Ngata clan prized so much.

“Nigh-night,” when Mako would tuck her into bed every evening at around ten o’clock, kissing her little forehead and her little cheeks and her little lips in the unspeakably gentle manner he reserved for bedtime. 

There were so many New Orleanisms she’d pick up from God knows where and drop thoughtlessly into conversation, as if she’d been born here instead of a whole world away. She’s still finding them, still injecting them into their shared life like unremarkable and yet deeply meaningful Crescent City antibodies. Mako doesn’t know where her facility with being here – being a person – came from. He doesn’t know if she is anything like him at all, sometimes. 

He’s wondered for years now when the metaphorical egg timer will finally sound its jubilant alarm and Kory will wake up one morning like he and her mother and their mothers and fathers did: apeshit crazy and with no clue what to do about it. Will he be ready with the proper cocktail of mood-stabilizing medication and behavioral health pamphlets for her use and perusal? Will he have a doctor and a hospital and a pretty padded room on hand? Will she be a crying kind of crazy or a screaming kind of crazy, or perhaps will she be a no talking at all kind of crazy? Will her crazy resemble her parents’ as if they’d simply been added to the same spiderweb-cracked glass punchbowl and none too gently stirred? Will her crazy be exponential to his and Aroha’s, the result of generations’ worth of compounded insanity and a steadily magnified genetic tendency toward biochemical irregularity and instability, Supercrazy, Crazy 4 ? Will she love him despite this awful gift he’s given to her? Will she understand how much he needed her in his life, knowing at the same time the value and the magnitude of the complex pain-containing vessel he was bringing into this world? Will she have moments of clarity resembling her childhood normalcy, and will she appreciate them truly, hold on to them like the precious jewels they are? Will he be able to contain her hurt somehow, hold it and her in his hands and use his guitar-callused fingers to pick the tangles between them apart? Will she turn to him the way she does now when she aches, or will she become like him and fold into herself like fractal origami, infinitely self-contained and self-possessed? Will she be okay, in the end? Will any of them ever be okay?

She comes downstairs wearing one of his T-shirts billowing about her thick, pudgy body like a dress – the one featuring Mickey Mouse in a gold chain and backwards baseball cap that she so loves to snag from his laundry pile and wear as pajamas, the one he bought from the Newtown Op Shop in Wellington before she’d even been a fraction of a twinkle in his eye. She’s carrying the translucent fuchsia container comprising her nail kit in both hands and has her backpack slung by its strap over one shoulder; when she joins his slumped, drowsy form on the sofa with her own, she dumps the latter on the floor and waves the former in his direction.

“Let me paint your nails,” she says.

Mako looks at her out of the corner of his eye. “Do I get to pick the color this time?”

Kory shakes her head with a slow, ominous deliberation that is so serious as to bring a smile to Mako’s face. “No, sir.”

Mako decides he is feeling daring. He lets Kory straddle his thighs and paint his nails alternating shades of Sally Hansen Hard As Nails Xtreme “Mellow Yellow” and Butter London “Her Majesty’s Red,” and she – free from the welcome manacle of her iPhone – continues to feed him details about her day.

“Candela was being totally weird today.”

Mako rubs the bridge of his nose with the hand not being worked on and ignores the angry vibration of his phone in his back pocket. “Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah, she like… she just found out that her mom is having a baby and she’s all upset because she doesn’t really think they can afford it, you know. As a family.”

“How many kids are there, besides her?”

Kory is silent for several seconds as she gives Mako’s left thumbnail a fresh coat of ochery yellow, then says, her loose tresses falling into her full moon face, “Just her younger brother. He’s eight, I think.”

“Mmnh.” Mako reaches to gently tuck Kory’s hair back behind the shell of her ear. “That’s a pretty good age. It was for you.”

Kory smiles without looking at him, moves on to his index finger and the mid-tone rougey polish. “Did I ever tell you about their dog? The first time I spent the night, I met their dog – this huge Pitt Bull-Lab mix named  _ Jock _ , or maybe it’s  _ Jacques _ like the French name, I forgot to ask – and he had this like, weird growth coming out of his chest? It was like this thick, flabby  _ thing _ just hanging down from right here-” She motions to her sternum with the polish brush and makes a toothy, squinty-eyed face of disgust. “I keep wanting to call it a hamburger, I don’t know why. I feel like things aren’t all okay… over there…”

“Well, at least you’re a good friend to her.” Mako watches his nail disappear between a slightly too thick wave of red that bleeds over onto his cuticle and the paler skin along each side of his nail. As Kory scrapes the excess polish away with her thumbnail, he gives her an inquisitive squint. “You are a good friend to her, right?”

Kory jerks her head back, indignant. “Of course I am.”

“That’s really all you can do.” Mako rolls his cranium from its base at his neck to the very center of his scalp against the arm of the sofa with a faint frown. “I know that probably doesn’t make you feel any better about the whole thing.”

“It doesn’t.” Kory’s face is a buttery, brown circle of sadness, a painter’s face, a teenage Madonna’s. There’s something astoundingly tender in the fringe of her eyelashes where they leave a sliver of shadow against her cheeks. 

“I just–” she says.

“I just,” she says.

“I just wish I could like…  _ take _ her, you know? Just take her and make things okay and safe for her. But I don’t know how to do that.”

Mako wants to kiss her. Instead, he lets her tilt his hand further into the late afternoon sunlight filtering through the window and tells her, “You can’t.” At the truly pitiful look she gives him, he smiles something soft and sorrowful. “I’m sorry.”

Kory makes a noise of pained acknowledgement. “It’s okay.” Having finished his left hand, she blows cool air over his wet nails and instructs him to, “Shake it.” While he does, she keels forward and lays her head momentarily down against the center of his chest, her hair pooling around her cranium like layers of liquefied dark chocolate.

She tells him about Candela’s odd, muted outburst at lunch today, when she wept at having been asked to hand a French fry over to Benjamin and spent seven subsequent minutes in the bathroom putting a whole new face of makeup on. She tells him how she caught Ms. Meaders smoking behind the gym this morning while sneaking to watch YouTube videos on her phone before class started, how the middle-aged physicist merely smirked at her and asked if she wanted a drag (to which she offered a polite no). She asks Mako, running her fingertips over the inky designs of seahorse, sea flowers, and seaweed on his left arm, if he would let her get a tattoo for her next birthday – and he, raising his eyebrows up to high heaven, informs her with not a moment’s hesitation that no, he will not be paying for the tattoo of a newly-minted fifteen year old (a sixteen year old, maybe, but fifteen is out of the question). She tells him that she’s been invited to a Christmas party hosted by seniors that she’s afraid to go to for fear of being in any way uncool, and Mako, wrapping his arms around her body curled atop his and sticking his face into the swirl of hair at the top of her head, murmurs, “You’re the coolest girl ever.”

“No I’m not,” is Kory’s muffled reply, uttered against the skin of Mako’s clavicle.

“Are you kidding?” Mako flattens an affectionate, McDonald’s-colored hand against the base of his daughter’s back. “You remind me so much of the type of girl I’d have been crazy about when I was your age.”

“You mean Aunt Tate?” Kory says with a snort.

“Yeah, and your mum.” Mako rubs his cheek against Kory’s crown until her hair bunches in messy waves and loops against his face. “Look at you, you’re sporty. A ballerina. You play the uke. You have your daddy’s good looks–”

“Oh my God!”

“And you’re smart as a whip and so full of love. You’re so cool, Kory, it’s insane.”

Kory is a whole sweet, smart, loving weight against him when she releases a deep  _ hmmm _ ing sound, happy and so full of adolescent insecurity. “I don’t believe you.”

In a tone that mocks hers from earlier: “Unacceptable! Believe it! Believe it!”

They end up dozing off like that, wrapped around each other on the sofa with nails painted and egos stroked.

There was a period in Kory’s fourth month of life when Mako hated her. Not a genuine, deep-seated hatred; just the temporary yet no less intense loathing all parents occasionally feel for their very young children with underdeveloped communication skills. He’d just gotten home after a month spent in the hospital. The vibrancy of real life’s colors sent him into tailspins in the wake of the institutional pastels and non-colors he’d been surrounded by in the mental health recovery unit at Wellington Regional. Aroha was just getting back to work after her somewhat truncated maternity leave – antsy to exist in the world once more in the edgy, frankly sort of infuriating manner she had about her, how she’d keep Mako up talking all night long in the way he’d adored and gladly participated in when they’d first started dating but had since grown to resent slightly, especially in light of his newfound bipolar diagnosis, which called for above almost all things adequate amounts of sleep. In the mornings, Aroha would fly out the door as fast as she could get all the scrambled eggs into her mouth, and Mako – jobless, half-sleepless, and recently thrust back into a life in which all things seemed to have been rearranged in his status as a new father and a crazy person – would be left alone with Kory, who was cutting her first tooth and absolutely inconsolable in his absence.

They had a system in those days. Straightforward and kind of hilarious. It went like this: Mako would remain in Kory’s sight at all times, and when he did not, she would lose her mind. If Mako in his insanity could count on nothing else, he could count on this. After three days of pure hell, he found a way to have Kory accompany him to the bathroom so that he could urinate without the nascent migraine that came with her hysterics: he’d simply lay her down in the sink’s stainless steel cradle and have her look, transfixed, upon his face while gnawing on her tiny brown fingers, then let one rip. Ditto this procedure with the kitchen, except, of course, when the sink was in use, in which case he did his dishwashing one-handed while cradling Kory against his hip and talking all kinds of calming nonsense to her – “This bowl is orange,” and “Here’s your mum’s favorite fork,” and “We bought this at a flea market a year ago,” and “Smell that soap. Doesn’t it smell good?” 

Kory didn’t watch Sesame Street. She watched him watch Sesame Street. She did not look if she was not looking at him. She loved more than all things to sit in his soft, terry cloth sweatpants lap and grasp his various features hard in her little baby hands: his cheeks, his chin, his lips and the shortish facial hair surrounding them. If ever he felt the urge to nod off in the middle of the day, to take a break from the unbearable superhuman task of merely staying awake and being in the world, he was forced to take Kory with him to bed or, if a move like that was too major, to stretch out on the sofa with her laid upon his chest, her head tucked against his and her hands still grasping at every part of him that she could reach. If he was lucky, he got maybe ten minutes of rest before she got hungry, or soiled her diaper, or simply realized the absence of his consciousness and began to cry out for him to come back to her with his attentive eyes and his soothing touch and his Kory-voice, the sweet and conversational undertone he used just for her. So they danced all around the house together, gazes locked, puree in her mouth, dirty nappies exchanged for clean, him existing entirely for her.

All of this infuriated Mako. By all accounts, he should have been over the moon to have been the crazy dreamboat milk-and-honey love of her life – even now, looking back on that time, Mako knows that if he was presented with the opportunity to go back to that place where he was the be all and end all of Kory’s entire existence, he would take it and he’d take it with relish – but then, in that intense and transitory period between losing it and trying not to anymore, between the awful trauma of Kory’s birth and the point at which loving her became more than merely biochemical, became genuine and real and not so suffocating as to literally almost kill him – all he felt was needed, and he resented being needed. He resented being the object and not the subject of such needing. His entire life he’d been water poured into the vessels of those he’d needed to hold him – Nana Victoria, his mother (when she’d allowed him to enter within her), Jem, Aroha – but the birth of his daughter the Pisces had forced him to become Aquarian before he’d really been ready to, before he had even fully processed what it meant to care for another human being in the way he’d always been cared for.

Kory, at four months, couldn’t handle being alone. She couldn’t stand it, in fact, required shared presence in consciousness and out of it and in her infantile brain equated loneliness with lack of love. Mako knew the feeling well, and he hated her – a baby and yet his mirror in emotional maturity – so much for reflecting to him this weakness of his. He never left her side, though, not until she’d been able to stomach independence, even if she stomached it badly.

Jem walks in the house at 6:45 on the dot and says, rousing father and daughter with both the elevated volume of his voice and the sheer noisiness that is opening and closing the front door, “Is this why no one in this house will text me back? We’re too busy napping on the couch?”

Mako, squinting over the top of Kory’s head, retorts, “Yeah, not to mention the fact that  _ no one likes you _ .”

Jem kisses both of their faces with exaggerated smacking noises, saying, “Hello, hello.” In lieu of going through all the hoopla of deciding what to cook for dinner and then going on to cook it, they order margherita from Mid-City Pizza and camp out on the sofa while Kory does her homework, reading  _ The Great Gatsby _ out loud to her daddies and ignoring the snide little comments they make every five minutes or so re: Nick Carraway’s “total gayness” and the intolerability of proto-yuppies. 

On Friday, Kory gets her teeth cleaned at the dental center on Maple. Truthfully they all need an appointment, but Kory is the only member of the household without an outrageous copay called for by her insurance plan, so the adults make do with their Listerine and cool mint dental floss. For a mere hour or so in the chair of Niles Ludo, DDS, Kory gets a whole afternoon out of school and in her father’s company. Mako ends up getting half the workday off as well, despite how Jem verbally wrestles with him that morning, assuring him, “I can take her, it’s no big deal,” and “You should stay at work, I’m sure they need you this time of the month.”

“Fuck off, I want to take my daughter to the dentist,” Mako tells him, mouth full of greenish-white toothpaste that spatters grossly onto his beard as he speaks.

“Wouldn’t it make more sense to let me do it, though?” Jem stands in the bathroom doorway, watching Mako slog through his morning hygiene routine with his arms crossed and his eyes all gooey. “Considering I literally have no obligations today…”

“You have a birthday in three days.” Mako spits Colgate into the sink and twists the faucet on. “Have a long weekend, eh?”

Jem watches Mako swish and gargle for thirty seconds that feel, in their void of words and all overt social exchange, like ten, perhaps twenty minutes. Expelling a breath that sounds, somehow, sharp and affectionate in tandem, he advances on Mako to thread his arms around his body and press a kiss into the base of his neck before retreating back into the master bedroom, mumbling, “Do what you want, bro.” 

Do what he wants, he does.

Kory’s bottom teeth are crowded in the front, her lateral incisors nudging into and in front of her centrals. Her top front teeth are slightly crooked as well, cuddling up to one another as if for warmth or simple closeness. Niles Ludo, DDS asks Mako, who skims half-interestedly through a 2012 Reader’s Digest from the waiting room, if he’s considered getting braces for his daughter, upon which the Gehringers exchange meaningful glances with one another, Kory currently incapable of speech and yet still communicative through the rapidity of her blinking and the particular quirkiness of her eyebrows.

“We’ve thought about it,” Mako replies, deliberately pronouncing that vague, elusive “we” that makes his household sound much more together and responsible than it is in practice. “But braces are a little too expensive for our budget.”

“That’s a shame,” the balding, stout little dentist intones. He pauses to retrieve the suction hose from his small metal tray of dental implements. “She’d be so much prettier with a flawless set of teeth.”

Mako’s face contorts as if it has been slapped. Snapping his gaze up and away from his Reader’s Digest, he glimpses the sudden, unmistakable shock and injury in Kory’s eyes, admittedly almost comical above her gaping mouth full of latex fingers and metal hooks. He is initially silent in his disbelief, unsure of how to respond, but then his thirty-eight years as a human being, fourteen and a half of them spent as a parent, catch right up to him and he says, guiltless in the terseness of his tone, “She’s pretty just the way she is.”

Niles Ludo, DDS is unfazed. “Of course she’s pretty,” he replies. “But nothing beats a straight smile, am I right?”

Utterly dumbfounded and concerned above all for Kory’s feelings, Mako crosses his eyes in his daughter’s direction, counting himself the hero of the hour when instead of wearing those sad, hurt eyes she put on at Ludo’s comment, laughter ripples across Kory’s face and she struggles momentarily to keep her mouth open for the dentist’s fingers and hose. “I guess you are,” he utters, “Especially if your paycheck is at stake.”

Niles Ludo, DDS doesn’t attempt any more friendly conversation after that. Mako bids a fantastically warm goodbye to the nurse and the receptionist, then buys Kory two scoops of chocolate peanut butter ice cream at the creamery on Prytania as an apology for her most socially harrowing experience of the past month.

“I literally can’t believe he said that.” Mako picks at his own boring scoop of strawberry with his plastic spoon, momentarily unsure of why exactly he bought himself ice cream when he doesn’t even have a taste for it. Consumerism, man. “Is it okay now for doctors to be total dicks to their patients?”

Kory makes a noncommittal noise of agreement, or perhaps just appreciation – it’s hard to tell, how inscrutable her face is. She shovels a hefty spoonful of her ice cream between her lips without speaking, and Mako watches her work her mouth around the melty brown mound the size of a ping-pong ball until pain streaks across her face and she presses the heel of her hand into her forehead in an obvious expression of brainfreeze, muttering, “ _ Shit _ ,” under her breath with a swiftness that both amuses and worries Mako.

“Language,” he says.

“Your fault,” she replies.

“You know he was wrong, right?” Mako gives up the pretense of trying to eat his ice cream and simply abandons the scoop to its slow, inevitable meltdown into thick pink soup. He starts to reach across the laminate tabletop for Kory’s hand, then changes his mind and just lays his palm down on the table between them, directing his gaze beyond her lowered, ponytailed head to the storefront windows of Creole Creamery, the middling traffic they reveal to him. “All he cares about is making money. He wouldn’t know a pretty girl if she bit him on the nose, which I would have done if I were you, pretty girl.”

“My teeth  _ are _ crooked, though.” Kory drops her spoon to hook her index fingers around her bottom lip and pull it down to reveal her bottom incisors. Her voice is distorted with the effort of not moving her mandible when she says, “Look how messed up they are.”

“Oh, please, Kory. They’re precious. Check this out.” Mako peels back his upper lip to display the prominent downward jut of his cuspids. “You’re not the only Gehringer with an imperfect mouth, love.”

“Yeah, but like…” Kory produces a harsh sound of discontent, pressing her face briefly into her hands and then pulling her hair over her shoulder to tug roughly at the ends of her ponytail. “You already have a person who loves you even though you don’t have a perfect body and perfect straight teeth and perfect straight hair.”

“Okay, what is with this trifecta of ‘perfect’, not to mention the gross Eurocentric beauty standards?” Mako gives Kory a look that rests somewhere on the spectrum between incredulous and plain concerned. “You’re adorable, and if someone can’t see that just because you don’t look like what, some crazy unrealistic Barbie doll, then obviously they’re not worth your time.”

Kory turns back to her ice cream, dragging the bowl of her spoon across a malformed chocolate hill and shaking her head just enough to be perceived. “You’re just saying that because you’re my dad.”

“I’m saying that because it’s true.” Mako waits until Kory raises her eyes to his. “I don’t lie to you just to make you feel better.”

Kory sighs. “Okay,” she says, then fills her mouth with ice cream and is stubbornly speechless. Mako knows she doesn’t believe him, at least not fully.

He thinks of last Tuesday, when he drove Kory to school and she, his sweetest thing, offered to call him at lunchtime. Her heart beat then on her sleeve, he saw it – the grotesque pulsation of her atria and ventricles and the accompanying spill of rich jelly blood everywhere – and he, not ectothermic but simply loving her and his privacy and the lonesome validity of his pain too much, didn’t tell her what was going on within him or within Mum. He lied to her to make her feel better, meaning he lied to her just now. He grimaces.

“Your Nana has cancer,” he says. When Kory’s expression stills around a spoonful of ice cream, he closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to see it, moves instead to cover his face with his hands and internally bemoans just how abruptly and how badly he wants an honest to God cigarette – not a puff off his vape pen and all the safety and self-love that represents. “She told me a week ago and I’ve been dying on the inside ever since, and I didn’t want to tell you and ruin your Friday, I’m so sorry, but I feel like you should know because I can’t keep lying about this every time you or Jem says ‘good morning’ or asks me how I’m doing and I say some bullshit like ‘I’m fine’ because the truth is that I’m not and I’m not sure if Nana is either. I’m sorry.” Then he opens his eyes, and Kory is watching him with moisture budding in the inner corners of hers. There is a stinging sensation in the inside-center of his face. “I’m so sorry, baby.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Kory’s voice is the strangled, horrid thing it is when she’s trying not to cry, and Mako knows instantly, as soon as he hears it, that he’s gone – done for, here come the hottest tears and the agonizing urge to scream.

“I didn’t want you to be upset.”

“Well,  _ thanks _ , but I’m upset now.” Kory, in an unexpected and uncharacteristic gesture of pure rage, flings her plastic spoon dripping with chocolate across the table, catching with it Mako’s elbow where it is propped against the laminate before the utensil clatters against the wall and down into the booth, where it is instantly forgotten about. Suddenly everything about her looks and feels as though it the deliberate result of her distress: the tendrils of hair coming out of her ponytail at its rubberbanded base, bunching up against her scalp like the fraying, curly bits of an old, sooty bit of rope; every wrinkle in her rainbow-striped T-shirt, the fabric rippling across her budding breasts in sharp, deep furrows; the small remainder of lipgloss left over after the dentist’s visit, smeared messily over her lower lip and on the skin just below it; her hyperpigmented acne scars dotted like scary, irate little islands along her cheeks. As he so often does, Mako wants to kiss her. He wants her face just like her mother’s in his hands, wants to hold her and refuse like a child to release her until he’s damn well ready to. He watches the anger in her face fade in rhythmic spasms into confusion and simple anguish, the shiny film over her eyes coalesce into actual tears that spill down over her cheekbones, and it is as if she is speaking to him underwater when she asks, so quietly he has to strain to hear it, “Why didn’t she say anything?”

“She doesn’t think anything’s wrong.” Mako is surprised by how upset he is at the asthmatic sound of his own voice. “She– she thinks she’s going to beat it.”

“But what if she won’t!?” Kory explodes with a sharp, stuttering cry. By now the other families and children in the creamery have latched onto the fact that they’re pretty much openly weeping in this extremely public place; rather than answering Kory’s question, Mako leads her out of the shop and takes her across the street to the Jetta, where they sit in the front seat and cry together before driving home and greeting Mum as if nothing has changed.

“You can’t talk about this with Nana until she says something to you first,” Mako tells Kory as he makes the left turn onto their street. She’s still blowing her nose into a McDonald’s napkin from the glove compartment, and he’s sniffling every thirty seconds like he’s finally caught his customary mid-December cold. “If you tell her you know, she’ll just act like it’s no big deal and trivialize your feelings and I just, I can’t let her do that to you.”  _ Sniffle-sniffle _ . “She can do that to me all she wants, but not you.”

Kory turns bleary, bloodshot eyes onto Mako. “That’s not very fair.”

“Life’s not fair.” Despite himself, Mako emits a dark peal of laughter. “If it was, your Nana wouldn’t have cancer and I wouldn’t be crying in front of my own daughter!”  _ Sniffle-sniffle _ .

As Mako parks the car in front of the house, Kory leans across the center console and gives his cheek a hard, insistent kiss. When Mum opens the door for them and asks them why they’ve very obviously been crying, Kory says, “We watched a sad short film on YouTube,” and Mako loves her with a ferocity he can barely express in words.

The weekend passes in a blur of surreptitious glances and secret giftwrapping. Mako spends Saturday night encasing Christmas presents in shiny golden paper and transparent Scotch tape in the upstairs bathtub while the rest of the family watches some overwrought Brad Pitt movie from the past year that he can’t bring himself to give a single shit about in the living room. When he comes downstairs and tucks his pile of glossy boxes beneath the Christmas tree, it is all he can do to keep Kory from diving in and shaking her presents, wrestling her away from the tree and chastising her – “Not until Christmas Eve, my little mermaid.” 

On Sunday, he lies in bed with Jem. Monday is the man’s birthday but also a long workday for both of them, so they take the latter half of the weekend to spoon and neck and yell, “Don’t come in!” at the door when Kory or Mum comes knocking, their bare bodies and saliva-sticky lips pressed together with a slow and gentle intensity that does so much to obliterate almost all conscious thought. In the late afternoon, just before Mako’s annual performance of some experimental culinary feat designed only to appeal to Jem’s palate (this year, it’s grilled zucchini boats stuffed with pesto, tomato, goat cheese, and other sundry chopped vegetables), they step out of their shared forty-minute shower and spend way too much time wrapped around each other in the queen-size once more, Jem finger-combing through Mako’s damp silvery curls and pressing his mouth into the jellied-out bolt of his jaw.

“Mako,” he says, threading his hands into the opening of Mako’s idiotically luxurious kimono to run his palms along the other’s sides and up and down the length of his spine.

“Jem,” Mako replies, letting his head drop down against Jem’s collarbone and inhaling the clean, cool scent of his skin.

“I’m glad I got to spend today with you.” Jem’s fingers are pattering, meteorological pressures against the central dip of Mako’s back, his face disappeared into the mess of his still-wet hair. “I feel like you’ve been on a different planet for a while, everything being so busy and you on your downswing. It was nice to get you back.”

“M’sorry.” Mako feels the familiar flutter of arousal in his gut when Jem’s hand skims along the back of his right hip, then reminds himself that he needs to actually make an appearance downstairs and cook today and deliberately registers the touch as purely affectionate rather than sexy. He raises his head, pausing on the way up to peck at Jem’s neck, crawls up over the other’s boneless and enrobed body to reach for the nightstand drawer and says, “I have something for you.”

Jem scoffs. “I thought I told you I didn’t want anything.”

“Yeah, well,  _ I _ wanted something so I bought it for you so I could wear it all the time anyway.” Mako returns his weight to his haunches with his beat-up copy of  _ Chronicle of a Death Foretold _ in his hands, straddling Jem’s thighs as he cracks the book open to the tiny plastic envelope containing the brass moonstone ring he purchased at Canal Place last Thursday. Dangling the envelope before Jem’s face until he takes it from him, he croons in his best Marilyn Monroe, “ _ Happy birthday, Mister President _ . I have a speech if you want to hear it, but it’s kind of bad, so.”

“Oh, my God…” Gingerly, Jem frees the ring from its transparent baggie, examining it in the goldenish light from the bedside lamp for long moments before Mako does the work of slipping it onto the fourth finger of his left hand. The two of them watch each other, quiet and breathy and fully submerged in the aqua vitae solution of love and contentment that the day has distilled between them, and Mako is content not to speak, to simply sigh and smile when Jem’s hands find his waist and squeeze him there, bring him ever closer to the dizzying emotional precipice he’s been waiting for like an orgasm since he first saw the ring at Anthropologie. Jem’s voice is a mere murmur: “Is this a proposal, Mako?”

Mako  _ hmm _ s, vague and scarily happy. “Do you want it to be?”

“We’re practically married already.” Jem makes a dark, delicious noise when Mako leans forward to place his hands and then his elbows on the mattress at either side of his head. “Do you want to get married? Like, for real?”

“I want to stay with you.” Mako rubs the tip his nose against Jem’s, then releases an expansive sigh of laughter into his face. “Yes, I want to get married. That wasn’t exactly the point of the ring, but it can be.”

Suddenly, they are rolling around the bed, limbs tangled and both of them half-howling with laughter, with unadulterated glee. It is everything Mako wanted to happen today, and he is so thrilled it close to terrifies him.

On Monday, Jem comes home with a gold chrysocolla ring that just borders on gaudy and makes Mako scream for five straight seconds upon the sight of it. Satisfied at their collective graduation from ordinary to extraordinary gays, they spend the better part of the afternoon and evening practically attached at the mouth and go to bed happier than they have in months.

Tuesday is Kory’s last ballet class before the Christmas holiday. Traffic is light, so Mako actually finds himself catching the tail end of the lesson when he arrives to pick his daughter up, walks in on a dozen teenage girls of all shapes, sizes, and colors dashing across the studio in  _ piqués en dedans _ , leading with their arms and the wide sweep of their right legs as they twirl diagonally through the room and culminate in half-clumsy fifth positions at a terminus near the locker room. Alyssa looks on from her station at the stereo streaming mid-tempo piano music in the vein of Debussy, her arms crossed and her feet perhaps thoughtlessly resting in fourth position. 

“Focus, focus!” Alyssa calls out to the last three dancers making their way to their classmates clustered in the far right corner of the room. “Don’t lose your balance just because you’re almost there! Keep it steady!” Then, when the last girl nearly stumbles to a stop and subsequently throws her arms up in muted victory – a sight so pure Mako has to physically keep himself from breaking out in laughter – Alyssa brings her hands together in a single clap of conclusion and begins to shoot off end-of-class announcements to the gooselike gaggle of twelve all shaking their limbs and panting with exhaustion: “Okay! Good work today, girls. Remember that class is  _ canceled _ on Thursday – I don’t want any of you showing up here and getting all surprised when the door is locked. Also! Over the break I want you all to work to the best of your ability at  _ finding your spot _ when you turn. That spot will save you. It’s the only way you won’t lose your balance, and you’ll need to get good at finding it before we start doing the hardcore pirouettes.” Curving her wide, pretty mouth into a smile that damn near dazzles, she gives the class a wave of dismissal in the direction of the locker room. “Go dress out, y’all. Have a wonderful Christmas!”

Mako watches the girls file out of the studio into the darkened corridor leading to the locker room, a many-limbed cloud emitting the low sounds of casual chatter as well as the occasional giggle. Near the back of the bunch, Kory loosens her hair from the ballet bun high on her head and directs an over-the-top, ridiculously toothy smile across the room at her father, who simply shows her his tongue in reply. Then it is just Mako and Alyssa, standing at opposite sides of the room and exchanging the awkward, expository glance that comes several seconds before speech.

“Hi,” Alyssa says.

“Hey,” Mako replies with a brief smile.

They are silent for several further moments, Alyssa busying herself with removing the CD from the stereo and depositing it in its rightful case, Mako fiddling with the lint in the pockets of his bomber jacket, finding entangled with them a silvery gum wrapper and an appointment card for December 19 th at China’s office. Mako, riding the high of his brand new engagement and moderately anxious after a day that has seen a full six cups of coffee and an inappropriately sugary lunch of, of all things, leftover birthday cake, feels uncomfortable not talking, not filling the space with words about whatever just happens to flit through his mind – Kory’s fifth grade talent show exhibition in which she danced a somewhat ungainly Swan Queen in a dress that oh so adorably resembled Björk’s from the 2001 Academy Awards, the strange New Orleans weather that had it in the ‘70s this morning and then a remarkably chilly 49 for the bulk of the afternoon, the family’s plan to spend Christmas watching Wes Anderson films in their pajamas, his curiosity regarding Alyssa’s life as it exists beyond this tiny ballet school on Adams Street – and it is this final thought that ends up leaving him in the form of a question, delivered into the smothering silence of the room with an abrupt loudness that surprises Mako once he is removed enough from himself to hear it: “Why did you decide to dance?”

Alyssa raises her head meerkatlike at the query; at her inquisitive look, Mako is abruptly self-conscious enough to blather on, elaborating: “I’m just, I’m always curious about why artists do what they do, I… I’m a writer and I used to do a bunch of other performance, theatre, filmmaking things on the side, and it seemed like everyone I met doing what I did had different but fundamentally similar reasons for their own creative practice, you know? And you’re obviously happy enough with what you do to teach it, so yeah. My partner’s a teacher and they – uh, actually  _ he _ , he says he started teaching because he  _ liked _ doing art and theatre and photography and all that stuff so much that he really wanted to get into the technical and theoretical parts of it with other people.” Mako pauses to laugh, tickled by the increasingly bemused expression on Alyssa’s face. “I don’t sound like a writer, do I? I can’t talk for shit. I just wanted to know about you, you know. What made you decide on your  _ thing? _ ”

For a few seconds, Alyssa says nothing, just rolls her head this way and that in a wordless expression of contemplation. She places the CD case on top of the stereo and taps on it a few times. “Hm.” Her fourth position shifts into a casual  _ cou de pied _ . “I started dancing the way most girls do – my parents put me in classes, etcetera. I think it  _ stuck _ , though, because I’m such an anatomy geek. God, I love muscles and bones. In another life I would have been a surgeon. Ballet dancers have so many of the same skills as surgeons, you know – kinesthetic intelligence, good timing, sense of balance, general or deep knowledge of anatomy, depending on how much of a nerd you are – but they… I feel like they perform those skills much more beautifully, and with so much more personal risk involved.” Alyssa’s voice has soared into the tender and amorous territory known to all creatives, parents, and/or earthly sensitives over the course of her speech, the tall and outstretched  _ S _ of her spine having gone slack and marginally shorter in her rapture; she sighs. “There’s just something about knowing that what I’ve chosen to do is finite, that I need to enjoy it as much as I can before I get too old or have an accident or just wear out.” Slowly, she turns from the distant spot in the mirror of her singular attention to Mako, who she gives a sheepish smile. “Is that dark or what?”

“Oh, yes.” Mako smiles back. “But I love it. It’s… relatable.”

Alyssa’s mouth broadens into that beautiful crescent moon she showed her class before suddenly shrinking into something more timid, bounded. As Mako moves to lessen the distance between them, to stand about two feet away from her rather than across the whole room, she finds her feet with her eyes and says. “I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable last Thursday.”

Mako furrows his brow. “What do you mean?”

“I asked you if you were worried about Kora not having a mother.” Alyssa shakes her head at an invisible something in the mirror. “You didn’t answer because she had just come out of the locker room, but I realized while I was driving home that night how messed up a question like that was–”

“It’s not, really.” When Alyssa looks at him, faintly surprised, he swats his hand dismissively at the air. “I can answer you now, if you really want.”

Alyssa lets loose a shocked, kind of delightful honk of laughter. “Please.”

Mako shifts his weight back onto his left foot as he thinks over his reply. “I don’t know if I’m worried.” Watching his reflection in the mirror, he brings a persnickety hand up to fluff through the mess of graying hair atop his head. “I really don’t know. I mean, my mum is with us now and I had female friends in New Zealand who spent lots of time with Kory when we lived there – but that was a long time ago, so I guess they’re kind of awful examples.” He shares a fleeting look of disorientation with Alyssa, eyes nearly crossing in that silly, idiosyncratic way of his, before returning his gaze to the thoughtful spot on the ceiling he’d been fixated on before the pause. “I’m more worried, I think, about her not having  _ her _ mother than her not having  _ a _ mother, you know what I mean? She has scads of mums. My mum’s her mum.  _ I’m _ her mum.  _ You’re _ her mum, for an hour and a half twice a week–”

“Oh, no.” Alyssa is wagging her head back and forth in the rapid-fire way that comes with extreme and quickly mounting embarrassment, her hands moving to cage themselves around her rosy monkey face. “I don’t think I count enough to be her mother–”

“No, you do!” Thinking nothing of it, Mako reaches to pull Alyssa’s arms downward, grinning somewhat sadly when she offsets the revelation of her face by turning it away from him. “You’re a guiding female presence in her life. Isn’t that what motherhood is?”

Alyssa narrows her eyes. “How exactly do  _ you _ figure as a female presence?”

Mako shrugs. “Gender is a fluid concept. I spent most of my formative years being raised by and around women and uh… atypical-gender individuals, so as far as I’m concerned, my masculinity is purely nominal.”

Alyssa’s smirk is shrewd, is just on the edge of teasing. “But you  _ are _ a man.”

Mako responds with an affected pout that is childish, reluctant, but more than anything an expression of easy concession. “You’re right. Maybe I’m not her mum.” Then, glancing off in the direction of the locker room, out of which the sounds of girlish laughter periodically emerge: “Maybe I should be worried.”

There’s a pronounced moment of silence before Alyssa says anything, interrupted only by the muted, jubilant commotion coming out of the locker room, at which the teaching ballerina produces a heavily oxygenated snort of amusement. When she speaks, her eyes are keen with affection, lit up with deep thought in a way that recalls Aroha’s piercing way of looking so much that Mako almost can’t look at her dead-on, though he forces himself to because he’s too old to be so thoroughly neurotic at all times. “I don’t think so. Kora is a really great kid – one of my stars, actually.”

Mako can’t stay the taffy smile that peels itself across his face. “Your ‘ _ stars _ ’?”

“Yeah.” Alyssa’s face is so soft the air around it cuts into it immediately, carving out of it rounded and peaceful shapes that cleave hard at the inside of Mako’s chest. “She’s so good, so dedicated. I don’t think you should worry about her at all.”

“I will, though,” Mako remarks. “Any suggestions, from a woman and a teacher?”

Alyssa gives her chin a pensive pinch. “Yoga,” she says, then flashes him with all of her teeth. “It’ll help with balance, for both her and you.”

“Yes ma’am,” is Mako’s nodding reply. When Kory comes out of the locker room her usual disheveled, sweaty post-ballet self, he hugs her so hard she complains of lack of air.

They find a yoga channel on YouTube hosted by a Thai-American Buddhist from Anaheim who has three precious kids and an equally precious Oriental Longhair that feature in all of her videos. On the last Friday afternoon before Christmas, after Mako comes home from work, Kory puts one of Bodhisattva Beautiful’s routines up on the television and the two of them spend half an hour moving their bodies through the geometric, geological, and breathtaking animal poses that constitute the beginners sequence, not as in-sync as they imagined they’d be and ultimately much sorer than Mako expected to be after so many years of mostly sedentary adulthood. Groveling in Child’s Pose after thirty minutes of twisting, perching, stretching, and flexing, Mako and Kory peer at each other across a thin, slivery sea of wine-colored wool with their arms cast backward and their temples pressed to the living room rug, and – abruptly tired of the isometric and exacting, if pleasingly energetic nature of yoga – Mako drags his right hand over to lightly touch the inside of Kory’s left. 

“You want me to make you a sandwich?” he asks.

Kory curves her mouth into a languid, loving smile. “Can it be a grilled cheese?”

Mako winks with the eye not millimeters from the rug. “You got it, love.”

That night, their sleep is divine.


	10. 10

#  _ 10 _

Before Christmas, there is the annual  _ Endymion _ Christmas party. In an attempt to not descend into the wild throes of alcoholism (an attempt that, by the by, grows ever more significant with each passing December day), Mako decides that he is going to bring the one thing in the world that will prevent him from overdrinking wine coolers and the holiday-appropriate Bloody Marys that are sure to be provided at the fete: his partner.

#    
  


**Today** 5:31 PM

**mako gehringer  
** are you on your way back yet??

please watch this video its the funniest thing ive seen today

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gJldDNe4Kg

also please please please tell me you’ve decided to come with. i don’t think i can survive another endymion party without you

i’ll give you a blowjob when we get home if you come ;)))

don’t text and drive

i love u!!!

**jeremiah tui  
** Texting and driving. I’m blaming you if I get in a debilitating accident and end up eating through a tube in my stomach for the rest of my life.

Actually I’m at a stoplight haha. So yes! I am on my way back and you can stop stroking out

**mako gehringer  
** did you remember kory’s ponytail holders?

**jeremiah tui  
** Sorry I was driving/watching the video at Claiborne and Elysian Fields (which, LOL)

I did get Kory’s rubberbands yes

**mako gehringer  
** are you coming w me to the party??

**jeremiah tui  
** Here’s the thing: I REALLY don’t want to. And obviously you don’t want to go either??

So how about we just skip the party and go straight to pre-Xmas blowjobs? Tis the reason for the season?

**mako gehringer  
** i promised priya i’d make an appearance :(

COME ON you know you want to mingle and judge my coworkers with me

you know you want to see me working the room in my sexy winter skinnies

we don’t even have to stay that long! thirty minutes tops!!

i’m sure jerri will have that really weird booze cake you loved so much last year! and this time you can eat it NOT off aluminum foil! but freshly cut! on her super nice plates! they’re gold!

jeremiah?

please???

#    
  


Five minutes later, Jem walks into the house with an armful of Wal-Mart and a thousand-yard stare. Immediately locking eyes with Mako, who sits cross-legged on the couch with Stevie halfway piled into his lap, he shudders.

“The next time I say I’m going to Wal-Mart, you’re gonna have to give me one of your green pills,” he says. Striding on long legs the meager four steps it takes to get to the dining table, he dumps his plastic bag booty down on the maple and expels about a gallon’s worth of air into the room. “I’m… so tired.”

“Aw, baby…” Mako gently disentangles Stevie’s kneading paws, claws extended, from the terry cloth of his sweatpants leg so that he can stand and cross over to where Jem is pulling his bottles of Cran•Mango and probiotic strawberry-banana juice out of grocery bags. He winds his arms tight around Jem’s middle and presses his mouth into the furry place at the nape of the man’s neck. “What happened this time?”

“There was a baby.”

“ _ Ooh _ , a baby. You usually like those.”

“Oh my God, Mako, it was precious.” Jem moves to turn around and make his way into the kitchen; instead of releasing him like a normal person, Mako simply stays clinging to his torso, walking right along with him with his toes up against his heels. “I couldn’t really tell if it was a boy or a girl, because it was wearing like, this green headband? Which usually makes me think  _ girl _ , but then it also had this dark blue onesie with white and red stripes, which is kind of a masculine clothing choice. Anyway, I try not to gender babies – or people in general, for that matter – after that time Robbie told me off at your, what was it, twenty-sixth birthday party about how gender is a purely social construct.”

“I’m not seeing the problem,” Mako says. “You saw a cute baby, you didn’t gender it – this actually sounds like a really great time for Wal-Mart.”

“Wait! Wait!” Depositing the juice in the refrigerator, Jem forcibly pries Mako’s arms open and turns within their loosened circle to face him. “I haven’t gotten to the bad part yet.”

Mako lowers his hands to rest against Jem’s hips, murmuring, “Tell me, tell me.”

“The baby was crying.” Jem brings his arms up to loop casually around Mako’s shoulders. “And  _ yes _ , babies cry, this was not the issue.  _ The issue _ was the fact that the baby’s mum was just, going in on this kid, just hardcore fussing like the baby knew it was ruining her whole life by having an emotion, or whatever–”

“God, she sounds like Mum,” Mako says, kind of loudly, before realizing that Mum’s room is not even ten yards away and shoving his mouth into Jem’s shoulder in his horrified, retroactive shame.

“It was sort of heartbreaking.” Jem leans his head into Mako’s, emitting a sound of throaty satisfaction when Mako steps between his feet to bring their bodies flush together. “I just wanted to reach out and shake this woman, and tell her to like, stop! Yelling! At! Her infant child! And all I could think of was this baby being raised in an environment where it’s just yelled at all the time and I, I know that’s really none of my business and I might actually just be catastrophizing one tiny event out of context but… it was so Wal-Mart, Mako. It was so exhausting.”

“I know how to make you feel better.” Mako’s words come muffled by the flannel of Jem’s shirtsleeve. 

“How?”

“I’ll take you to the  _ Endymion _ Christmas party.” When Jem shoves Mako out of his embrace – mostly gently, but with an unmistakable and even somewhat alarming firmness – Mako puts on the prettiest anime princess eyes he can manage, clasping his hands together in an expression of pious desperation and imploring, in a tone that begs to be called a bona fide whine, “I  _ need _ you there, Jeremiah. Priya caught me in a weak moment–”

“Oh, you have those? Where you give a shit about people’s feelings and everything?”

Mako’s eyes screw up remarkably narrow remarkably fast. “That’s… mean. You think I don’t care about your feelings?”

“I don’t think you care about my feelings right now, no!” Jem says this as he stalks out of the kitchen, ignoring the rest of the groceries on the table and detouring right for the stairs. “I feel like if you did care, you wouldn’t be badgering me into doing something we both don’t want to do.”

“Okay – fair, but still mean.” Mako trails Jem upstairs into the master bedroom, where the other swiftly kicks his shoes off into the closet on one end of the suite before crossing into the bathroom at the other end, not closing the door behind him. From his posterior vantage point, Mako watches Jem stand over the toilet, raising the seat in one quick, methodical motion, unzipping his jeans and freeing his penis from his briefs in another. Just as the stream of urine hits the water in the toilet bowl, Mako reaches behind himself to close the bedroom door and says, “I do care about your feelings. I want to do this with  _ you _ .”

“Why?” Jem asks. The word and the sound of his urination alike echo faintly in the clinical acoustical environment of the bathroom.

“Because! I don’t want to get drunk alone at a work party three days before Christmas.” Mako is mere seconds from prostrating himself in the doorway; because he has a modicum of self-control and perhaps too high a degree of love for himself, however, he merely leans into the doorframe and makes his voice quiet, painfully tender and oh so feathery around the edges. “I want to get drunk  _ with you _ at a work party three days before Christmas. I love you and I want to spend time with you.”

Jem glances at Mako over his left shoulder. “This isn’t just because you want me to save you?”

“I mean, I’m not going to lie to you and say that that isn’t a big part of it, because it is.” Mako figures he gets at least some points for the brutal honesty they both favor so much. “But I also genuinely do want you with me. I want to have a good time  _ with you _ .”

As his urination tapers off, Jem says nothing. Mako watches him, heart in stomach, as he flushes the toilet, lowers the seat, and then wordlessly, expressionlessly moves to wash his hands. They’re about a minute into this prolonged moment of silence when Jem sighs, turns the faucet off, and says, looking at Mako’s collarbone rather than his eyes, “I went to Wal-Mart today. I don’t think I have a party in me.”

Hearing this does not, somehow, deprive Mako of the will to live. This may have something to do with the fact that Jem has been telling it to him in about thirty different ways over and over for the whole day before this moment, not to mention the fact that immediately after, Kory’s voice comes yelling from down the hallway: “Daddy!”

Not tearing his eyes away from Jem’s soft, tired face, Mako hollers back, “In a second!”

“The internet went out again!” she yells.

“I’m coming, baby!” Then, just a smidge quieter: “Just give me a second.”

Mako zips downstairs to restart the modem. He pokes his head into Mum’s room and finds her asleep on top of the covers, television on and broadcasting a rerun of  _ Law & Order: SVU _ . He goes back upstairs to check on Kory, who shows him a positively mesmerizing video of a fox trilling and cackling with laughter before he notices the time (6:02 PM) and announces, both to himself and to her, “I need to start getting ready.”

“For what?” Kory asks.

“The Christmas party.”

“The one you’ve been complaining about all week?” Nestled against him in her bed, Kory gives Mako a look that is half-disapproving, half-sympathetic. “Why are you going?”

“I promised my boss,” Mako replies with his eyes closed. “And there… will be alcohol.”

“Ooh, are you going to drive?”

“Maybe.” Mako tilts his head backward until it rests against Kory’s pillow, the one with cartoon clownfish clusters and dyads of blue tang swimming across the cotton blend pillowcase.

“You shouldn’t if you’re going to drink.” By now, Kory has turned back to trawling through her Tumblr dashboard, laptop propped against her folded-up legs and gaze fixed upon her monitor. She scrolls with a distinctly nervous rapidity past what Mako swears to God, in the half-second in which he sees it, is a photograph of a heavyset man wearing only a jockstrap and asks, casual and curious, “Is Jem going with you?”

“No.”

The left corner of Kory’s mouth dips down in a gentle frown. “I don’t think you should drink.”

Mako feels abruptly caught between the super adult urge to shrug off her concern and do whatever he wants – empowered by the utterly idiotic if not completely unwarranted conviction that he, a thirty-eight year old who has been living in New Orleans for the past eight years, is a competent enough drinker and driver to be both of these things in tandem and get himself home tonight without vomiting, crying, or splattering himself across the Gentilly asphalt – and the almost childlike empathy he has for her apprehension, for the emotional thorniness of the crossroads that suddenly exists between them. He doesn’t want to be the kind of parent that pooh-poohs his daughter’s unease just because it’s inconvenient. In a perfect world where he could be as self-destructive and reckless as he wanted, he wouldn’t have to pooh-pooh anything at all. In an even more perfect world, he would feel no impulse toward self-destruction to begin with, and he would stay home and enjoy the fruit juice spoils of Jem’s unpleasant trip to Wal-Mart and watch viral videos with Kory all night long. He and Jem wouldn’t have stupid fights over nothing and everything of substance. Mum wouldn’t have cancer. He wouldn’t want to die.

Mako tugs the short sleeve of Kory’s T-shirt up over her shoulder to drop a kiss on her mosquito bite-scarred skin. “I’ll be careful,” he utters, with a loving ambiguity that at least seems to mollify Kory’s misgivings if the butter toffee smile she gives him is anything to go on.

He gets dressed. Jem watches from the bed while pretending to read something probably news-related on his Kindle. Poking around in the closet for his button-down decorated with a tiled pattern of various dog breeds clad in jolly red scarves that is almost too busy to even be wearable, standing shirtless with his sweatpants hanging loosely upon his hips, Mako feels Jem’s eyes on his naked back, tracing around the Maori sun tattooed between his shoulder blades and along the indented line of his spine as it runs, disappearing, into his waistband. When he finds his shirt – squished into the very far left of the closet behind a veritable avalanche’s worth of sweaters – and emerges from the closet pulling it off its hanger with a musical little hum in his throat, Jem breaks the comfortably uncomfortable silence between them: “That’s what you’re wearing?”

Mako squints briefly at him. “You love this shirt.”

“Well, yeah.” Jem shakes his head as he turns back to his Kindle. “I just thought you were going to wear something more Christmassy, I guess.”

“These are dogs wearing scarves,” Mako remarks. He pulls the shirt over his arms and then the broad, lean spread of his shoulders, positions himself in front of the full-length mirror as he buttons the garment from his navel to his sternum. “I can’t think of anything more Christmassy than that.”

Jem simply makes a low noise of acknowledgement. Back turned, Mako gingerly rids himself of his sweatpants, and there are the eyes again – watching him pace back to the closet in his briefs so that he can retrieve his most devastatingly sexy pair of skinny jeans, the ones that make his legs look as though they go on for ages and his ass as high as it’s ever going to get without surgery.

He puts his pants on. He inspects himself, tucks his shirt in only in the front. He and Jem accidentally lock eyes in the mirror, hold each other for one, two, three gauzy seconds before Mako blinks and escapes into the bathroom to trim his beard, refresh his deodorant, maybe put some cologne on – he hasn’t decided how fancy he’s feeling yet. It is 6:24 – six minutes until the specified start of the party – and he is sitting on the edge of the mattress and putting his Doc Martens on when Jem sighs, loudly, and proclaims, “I’ll go with you.”

Mako’s fingers go still around the mustard-colored laces of his right boot. “Why?”

“Honestly? Because you look  _ really _ good.” Jem’s hand presses into the middle of Mako’s back. “Plus, I’d feel bad if you went alone and had an awful time.”

“Oh, please.” Mako returns to tying his shoes. “I was just being a whiny bitch earlier. You  _ really _ don’t have to come–”

But Jem is already sliding off the bed and retreating to the closet, saying, “Just let me put a sweater on.” When Mako gives him a quick look of bemusement – a look that falters slightly when Jem begins to peel his flannel shirt off, revealing his thick torso dappled with swaths of dark hair – he just curls his mouth into a somewhat naughty smile and remarks, “Let’s just act like I’m doing this for the blowjob.”

Mako snorts. “You’re not?”

Jem turns away to search for something to wear. “Who knows?”

The sweater is an immaculate thing of fuzzy white wool that Mako gave to him two Christmases ago. It looks so good on Jem that Mako wants to kiss him on the mouth, so Mako does.

They take turns kissing Kory goodbye – filling her in on the current state of the kitchen, the frozen Digiorno in the freezer and, if she has a taste for it, the leftover chicken legs and gravy in the refrigerator – and then pile into the Jetta. Jem rifles through the armrest for an old CD to put on, remarking, “I think I’ll die if I have to listen to any more dusty-ass Christmas music on 98.5.” Turning the car onto St. Claude, Mako reaches across Jem’s lap to get into the glove compartment, out of which he retrieves a nearly full pack of Marlboro menthols, so fresh he hasn’t even entirely removed the cellophane wrapper yet. Jem watches Mako one-handedly extract a cigarette from the pack with a newfound sharpness in his features, a delicate surprise that reveals itself in the temporarily wide-open state of his eyes and the way his jaw gently, but appreciably, drops.

“Since when are you smoking cigs again?” he asks.

Mako tucks the cigarette between his lips and presses his thumb into the button for the car’s built-in lighter. While waiting for the heat to build within the lighter, he says, “Since yesterday. Or, no–” His brow furrows in momentary thought. “Since Friday night when I went to get you a pack of Reese’s from Frady’s.”

Jem, when the lighter  _ clicks _ , brings the implement up to hotly cup the exposed end of Mako’s cigarette. Giving Mako’s upper thigh an appreciative squeeze when he rolls his window down and raises his cigarette to throw the majority of its thick, smoky tail outside, Jem gazes out of the windshield into the dark, fluorescently-lit outdoors and says, vaguely, “More power to you.”

Mako lightly flicks the butt of his cigarette. “Don’t say that.”

“Sorry.”

“I’m stressed.”

“I know you are.” Apparently unsatisfied with the Chicago song currently streaming from the car speakers – something annoyingly upbeat in the brassy, Midwestern way only Chicago is – Jem fiddles with the SEEK button until the horns give way to gossamer strings and lovey-dovey vocals. His hand finds Mako’s thigh a second time. “Can we not fight tonight?”

Mako makes his voice as impassive and lepidopteran as possible when he replies, “I’m trying not to.”

Jem pinches the tender, sensitive muscles near his pelvic girdle. 

Mako flicks his cigarette butt again, then slips it into his mouth and lets the smoke collect like fresh water in the back of his throat.

Jerri Dupin,  _ Endymion _ ’s culture editor and, on most days, at least its second-craziest personality, lives in a split-level bungalow the color of mint chocolate chip ice cream in the historic Crescent City neighborhood of Gentilly Terrace. This particular Yuletide, the task of hosting the annual Christmas party has fallen to (or, perhaps more accurately, been aggressively and rather territorially claimed by) her. When Mako pulls the Jetta up onto the free sliver of curb space between the candy red hot rod belonging to Flora – the interminably glamorous editorial assistant for the news section – and a nondescript blue Honda Civic he’s never seen before (and yet, in a way, has glimpsed a thousand different times all over New Orleans), he is able to spy across the street two of the staff writers and Annie congregating on Jerri’s porch – perhaps waiting for the door to be answered, perhaps escaping from the probable insanity inside the house.

“Oh God, Annie’s here,” Mako notes with a sigh of relief. “My only sane person, the love of my life.”

Jem cuts his eyes at Mako as he keys the engine off and unbuckles his seatbelt. “I thought I was the love of your life.”

“Oh, my dear.” Mako brushes the backs of his fingers, sweet and impossibly gentle, along the stubbled line of Jem’s jaw. “You’re just a second-string love for me. Sorry you had to find out like this.”

Jem’s hand is so very affectionate when it shoves Mako’s yelling, lunatic face away into the driver’s side window. As they make their way across the street – not quite hand-in-hand in actuality, but something like it in spirit – Mako passes Jem the car keys with a hint of prophetic knowing about him, anticipating the course of the evening before he’s even tasted a single drop of alcohol.

Annie is the first Endymionite to see them. Gray-blue gaze drifting in the midst of what appears to be an utterly riveting conversation between Kiev and Stanley, the moment her focus alights on Mako and Jem stepping up onto the grass-encrusted, cracked and even crumbling sidewalk, she emits a somewhat melodramatic gasp and comes half-skipping down the porch steps, crying out, “Mako, Mako, Mako!” seconds before her arms come up around said man’s neck in a loving death grip that he has no interest in breaking.

Mako holds Annie to him in the tight curve of one arm, playfully uttering her name in triplicate as well – “Annie, Annie, Annie” – and choosing to ignore the fleeting, probing looks they’re getting thrown from the porch. Pulling halfway out of her grasp to kiss the apple of her left cheek – her skin glittered and rosy with blush and  _ not _ , by the way, the chilliness of the ambient temperature (which is a quite clement 65 rather than a perhaps more Christmassy 42) – he raises his hand to rub briefly the closely-cut growth of hair along the back of Annie’s head and says, with a nod in Jem’s direction, “I was just telling this one you were the love of my life.”

“Aw, Jeremiah.” Annie gives Jem a look of velvet sympathy beneath the yellow light of the nearest streetlamp. “He’s so mean. I’m sorry he’s so mean.”

“I should be apologizing to you,” Jem replies. “I’m his wrangler. I should be raising him better.”

“Is that Miss Bailey and my fuzziest lil kiwi man?!”

Jerri stands in the doorway of her home, a mere five feet and one-hundred and twenty pounds of hypercompressed offbeat funkiness and New Orleanian zest for life clad in a holly green fringe dress that would have been appropriate party wear in the 1920s. As Annie, Mako, and Jem pass into the house one after the other, they – even Jem, despite Jerri having only the most fleeting of knowledge of him – are accosted with kisses by glossy lips and hugs by wiry arms. 

“Go right ahead into the kitchen and get a drink,” Jerri says with her mouth pressed almost conspiratorially against the shell of Mako’s ear, seconds before she releases him and yes, shoves him into the house. She adds, slightly louder, “I’ll meet you there in a second. I wanna tell y’all all about my Bloody Mary recipe, but I want y’all to taste ‘em first. Get!”

As Jem sidles up to Mako and they step into the atmospherically lit living room festooned with silver streamers and half-crowded with coworkers, he asks in a whisper, “Does Jerri have a thing for you that I haven’t been made aware of?”

“Everyone has a thing for me.” Mako threads his fingers with Jem’s and pulls him in the direction of the kitchen, trying and failing not to make eye contact with literally every single person in the living room: half of the writing staff in clusters of twos and threes standing dangerously close to Jerri’s various wooden, ceramic, and glass sculptures of abstract shapes and sub-Saharan wildlife; Naomi and Flora and Jackson commandeering the sofa and all poring giggly and smiling over the massive coffee table book on Igbo artwork; Jackie and his wife looking expectedly overweight and mostly uncomfortable near the bookshelf and sharing a glass of pear-colored champagne; David in his wheelchair actually  _ sleeping _ in front of  _ Die Hard _ on television, which Mako wants to laugh at but instead forcibly schools his outward expression into one of simple, bland amusement. He can hear the editor in chief’s high, lilting voice coming out of the kitchen in happy aural shapes as they approach; turning to speak directly into Jem’s ear, he says, “Let’s see if we’ve arrived before Priya has gotten completely smashed.”

Upon entering the room, they are greeted with the sight of Priya sitting fully on the floor, legs outstretched, attempting to feed Jerri’s King Charles Cavalier sips from her overflowing glass of Bloody Mary.

“Too late,” Jem mutters. Again, Mako bites back his guffaw.

“Oh my God!” Annie all but runs over to snatch the dog out of Priya’s reach. “Don’t do that! You could kill him!”

Priya – immaculately made up, dressed in a sheer, sparkling blouse that nearly blinds in the light – places her Bloody Mary between her parted, denim-clad thighs, leans back on her palms, and gives the congregation a spellbinding smile. “Who said that wasn’t the point?”

Mako blinks. “Attempted murder?”

Priya throws her head back and laughs. “If this had happened in the wild,  _ no one  _ would be upset. If this poor inbred creature had just happened to stumble upon a bit of overripe fruit in the uncivilized jungle or woods or whatever environment you fancy and helped herself – or himself, I think I saw a penis – and then  _ died _ through its own evolutionary predisposition towards sweet, fermented tastes, then nobody would be throwing words like ‘ _ murder _ ’ around. It would just be the way of the world. We’re all just bumping into one another, interacting, doing as we please, having fun. I’m sure the little fella would have had a hell of a time before his nervous system depressed to the point of death. Oh!” Priya’s eyes attach with a sudden intensity to Mako’s face; she reveals to him all of her perfect, slightly wolfish teeth. “I’m so glad you actually came, Mako. I was worried you were going to duck out like last year.”

This is classic Priya, and nobody, for the moment, can argue with anything she’s said. Annie clutches the King Charles Cavalier closer to her breast and gives Mako an uncomfortable look. Priya lies down with her arms crossed over her face and releases a deep sigh into the air above her. Mako smiles at Annie and Jem in a manner that best conveys his desire to be as stinking drunk as the editor in chief is. Jem smiles back, and reaches for the crystal pitcher of vodka and tomato juice on the counter behind him.

The next hour and a half progresses in the thoroughly pointless fashion that every  _ Endymion _ function does. For fifteen minutes, Mako and Jem are held hostage in the kitchen listening to Jerri’s chronicle of how she, over the past two months, has searched far and wide through the cookbook sections of every bookstore in the Gentilly and the Bywater for the “perfect, perfect, perfect” cocktail recipe for this “intime soiree”; her involved process of elimination of a spiced-up screwdriver that struck her as “too summery,” a jungle juice that may have been “too collegiate,” and about six other drinks that she describes one by one in intimate detail before finally arriving at the “Sistine Chapel of Bloody Marys”: vodka, tomato sauce, lemon juice, garlic and herb sauce, Worcestershire sauce, and – and here’s the Sistine part of it –  _ piri piri _ sauce with pickled okra as a garnish – and all the while she winds through her extended speech as if she’s performed it three times already and is still discovering the most thrilling narrative beats upon which to elaborate – the dark night of the soul that was December 14 th , when she impulse-bought a two-hundred-dollar pair of shoes at the Riverwalk and was nearly forced to cut her alcohol budget in half; her husband’s quite vehement disapproval of the Bloody Mary recipe, which precipitated a Yuletide rift in their relationship that hasn’t quite been mended yet; the fact that she’s been some degree of drunk on her potion since yesterday at 11:30 in the morning; and the magic of just over an hour ago, when Priya arrived as her very first guest and consumed half of the first pitcher within nearly twenty minutes – Mako carefully sips his way through his whole twelve-ounce glass of tomato liquor and just about a third of Jem’s and watches Priya poke around Jerri’s kitchen with a glimmer of mischief and determination in her eyes – sticking her head in the fridge and nibbling on circles of Babybel cheese; flicking her bone-straight hair flippantly over her shoulder while she idly rotates the glass containers of sugar, flour, and coffee on the countertop; picking the red peppers off of the hors d’oeuvres and popping them into her darkly lipsticked mouth; and, finally, stumbling into and overturning the tray full of Jerri’s nicest champagne glasses, after which Mako takes the opportunity to escape from the kitchen while Jerri and Priya verbally scream it out for the eighth year in a row. Then it’s drifting around the living room with Jem, overhearing small snatches of conversations about the power surge last week that nearly stopped the January issue from going to print and literally destroyed David’s hard drive; about the vapidity of the early morning news programs these days, the most vapid of those including  _ Good Morning America  _ and the local favorite, WDSU on Channel 6; about a designer drug neither Mako nor Jem have ever heard of called “bath salts” that apparently resulted in some man in the Tremé eating half of his own face off about three years back; about the synthetic gustatory beauty of tangerines and how much Eryka, a staff writer, is currently “dying” for one. Then it’s sharing with Annie and Jem petit-four-sized squares of white cake with rosé mixed into the icing, commenting idly on the uncanny taste of alcoholic fondant and, when the frosting gets into his beard, nearly screaming with drunken laughter when both Annie and Jem swipe the pinkish glaze off with their thumbs, which they then suck. Then it’s stealing (i.e., good-naturedly asking for and receiving) Naomi’s untouched glass of sangria wine cooler and swapping with her stories about their children, complaints regarding the Orleans Parish School Board, unwhispered accounts of the party before Mako’s arrival (which apparently saw Jerri’s husband leaving in a bit of a huff to retrieve more liquor from the grocery store – a trip from which he has not since come back) and the increasingly loud ordeal currently occurring in the kitchen, how, in light of Jerri and Priya’s ongoing genuine feud, utterly expected it all is. 

Mako eventually excuses himself to self-isolate in the bathroom, which is, when he finds it in the dark bedroom-adjacent corner of the house, occupied by some unidentifiable singing person (he thinks it’s either Jackson or Tony, based on the mid-pitch but distinctively masculine tone of the voice). In the interim while he waits, he texts Jem with his back against the wall between Jerri’s son’s bedroom and a tableau of grayscale family photographs. 

#    
  


**Today** 7:32 PM

**mako gehringer  
** where are u?

**jeremiah tui  
** Talking with Annie on the porch

We’re considering kidnapping the dog for its own safety. For the night at the very least. We’ve named him Donalbain.

Are you… texting me frm the bathroom? :}

**mako gehringer  
** no im waiting there’s someone in there singing gypsies tramps and thieves

im not kidding

**jeremiah tui  
** LMAO WOW… okay….

**mako gehringer  
** do u want to go after i get out? if i stay any longer im gonna keep drinking and im lowkey scared of that

we don’t have to go if ur having fun tho

**jeremiah tui  
** I don’t think fun is the word lol

But I’m not having a BAD time, surprise surprise. I think outside is better than inside.

Come sit with me and Annie. I’m driving home so relax :)

**mako gehringer  
** mmmm wow i love you like so much

hold on i think the person is coming out. ill see u soon xoxo

#    
  


Jackson emerges from the bathroom at that moment, looking chic in his dark sequined blazer and glazed doughnut makeup that has his beautiful burnt umber face shining in the meager light coming from the dining room down the hall. It takes him a moment to register Mako’s presence directly in front of him – his eyes slightly unfocused; his face a mask of blind, inebriated contentment – but when he does, he breaks into a breathtaking grin and cries, “Mako!”

“Jackson,” Mako replies, trying not very hard to match said man’s enthusiasm.

“I haven’t seen you since you walked in, like, three years ago!” Jackson says, and then he’s reaching to pull Mako into a quick, one and a half-armed hug, to rub Mako’s back and oh so affectionately grip the man’s shoulder. Sweeping his gaze down over Mako’s body once, then twice, he utters, voice light and oxygenated, “Wow, you look so  _ good! _ ” He briefly grips Mako’s shirtsleeve. “What is this shirt? It’s precious.”

Mako is, as he always feels in Jackson’s presence, overwhelmed with the experience of being so adored in purely superficial fashion. He pushes through the physiological nimbus of about five and a half standard drinks for an approximately genuine, approximately lovely smile. “Thank you. It cost two dollars.”

Jackson produces a strident, raucous laugh that is somewhat disproportionate to the hilarity of what Mako has said. Still clutching Mako’s shoulder almost as if he’s holding himself up by doing so, he peers directly into the other’s eyes and asks, “That nice-looking dude you walked in with – he’s your boyfriend?”

Mako’s smile is only slightly less pleasant this time. “For six years this week.”

“Aw, man, congratulations.” Jackson’s hand comes up and down on Mako’s shoulder in a series of celebratory claps. “Merry Christmas. Mazel tov. You said you were Jewish, right?”

“Ethnically.” This, strangely enough, pulls a giggle from deep in Mako’s gut. “My dad, he’s Jewish, but I’m not, like, I don’t practice. Hanukkah isn’t my holiday.”

“Oh.” Jackson’s expression is momentarily one of soft bewilderment; then it turns back into the slippery smiling thing it was before. “Still – mazel tov. I’m glad you’re Jewish and in love and queer and here and every wonderful, good thing you are.” He opens his long, sequined arms. “Can I give you another hug? I’m going to give you another hug.”

And then Mako is being gently crushed in Jackson’s sparkly hold, rocked back and forth until the hallway totters uncomfortably and he wants the bathroom with a ferocity that nearly winds him. When Jackson finally liberates him to go ambling back into the party proper, Mako puts himself in the bathroom, locks the door behind him, and sighs long and loud enough to rid himself of all breath.

“Hey,” he says to his reflection, a Jewish, enamored, queer, present, slightly disheveled figure under the dramatic hazelnut-colored lighting coming down in sharp, rectangular shafts from above the mirror. He takes stock of what he sees in his doppelganger: the uneven folds of drying skin like tiny scales on his chapped lips; his beard dusted with slightly more gray than he remembers seeing in it a month ago; his dark, dark eyes ringed with crescent-shaped shadows that appear almost catastrophic in this light; the look of thin, raw desperation about him, as if he were a prey animal convinced of the presence of a predator and yet without evidence to support its conviction.

“Hey,” his reflection offers in response. The reply is a small, yet tangible comfort. 

Mako turns to the wooden elephant sculpture on the counter; the plastic potted palm parked next to the rippled glass shower stall; the ostentatious, sort of vomit-worthy gold leaf ceiling; the massive, fourteen year old photograph of Jerri – naked, recently having given birth, holding her newborn son against her milk-swollen breasts – framed above the toilet and affording him a loving, if somewhat sultry stare. Finding the act of looking at everything, anything else suddenly quite exhausting, he plops down on the toilet, closes his eyes, and waits. Until his heart beats slow. Until the golden, nutty light fades behind his eyelids into featureless, uterine darkness. Until somewhere within him, there is a California king bed and a whole mess of wooly silver hair in which he can bury his hands and his face forever.

He wonders why everything in him is always leaning, craning, turning head over heels back into the past.

There are juice glasses full of champagne in the kitchen. When Mako peers into the trashcan, he finds the fragments of Jerri’s broken champagne flutes in a dense, shiny pile on top. He takes the tallest and the fullest of the juice glasses; offers a distant, noncommittal smile to Rosie, one of the staff writers, when she drifts into the kitchen; then makes a beeline for the front porch, where Annie is showing Jem her album of at-work selfies that she and Mako have taken during their afternoons filled primarily with procrastination and boredom above all else.

“Okay, so this is one he took right after he pulled his plugs out and showed me his ear cheese,” she is saying, and Jem is making a noise that is equal parts amusement and disgust, spreading his fingers over Annie’s iPhone touchscreen and zooming in on a slightly blurry snapshot of the woman wearing the squealing, shrieking face of a banshee.

“I hate when he does that,” Jem says. “When he’s trying to piss me off – or, actually a lot more often, when he’s trying to wake me up – he’ll pull his gauges out and shove his earlobe in my face. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.”

“Oh my God!” Annie, who is cradling Jerri’s King Charles Cavalier (or, Mako guesses, Donalbain?) in her arms like a human infant, half-tumbles into Jem’s personal space and against his sweatered shoulder with an easy, effortless sort of familiarity that may be the product of her inebriation or, alternately, just her own characteristic sweetness – her sweetness that Mako has adored from the moment they met, her sweetness that was probably the first real thing rooting him in New Orleans after he moved here. In the midst of a high, somewhat uncontrolled giggle, she asks Jem, “Did he, did he ever give you the rundown of the historic earhole blowout of 2007?”

“The  _ rundown? _ ” Jem swipes on to the next photograph, one of Mako and Annie posing Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers cheek-to-cheek and making melodramatic eye-rolling, fishy-mouthed faces at the camera. He gives Annie his beautiful, gap-toothed grin. “I was  _ there _ . Front and center. Who do you think rubbed tea tree oil on his earholes three times a day, every single day for two weeks?”

“You’re right,” Annie replies. “He’s such a baby. He wouldn’t have done it himself.”

On that charitable note, Mako decides to make his presence known.

“You know, I can just go back inside,” he announces and, when Annie and Jem turn to him with heartstoppingly similar expressions of shock and adoration, gestures expansively to the sidewalk with his glass of champagne. “Or like, take a walk around the block while y’all continue to talk shit about me.”

“Mako!” Annie yells his name as if it is the only sound she is physically capable of producing, her face blooming in triple time as a flower of happiness, of love. Without releasing Donalbain from her grasp, she toddles over to snuggle her body against Mako’s, emitting a merry little noise when the man takes mercy on her (or, in actuality, finds his heart instantaneously liquefied in his chest) and wraps his arms around her and the wriggling dog alike, tucking his face in beside hers until she cries out with laughter at the scratch of his facial hair against her skin.

Meanwhile, Jem is snatching his half-drained Bloody Mary off the porch’s wooden balustrade and watching the two of them with bright, cotton-soft eyes. “I thought you were going to stay in there forever,” he says.

“I’m starting to think I should have,” Mako retorts, snarky. He is robbed of every ounce of playful bitterness when Annie presses her mouth into the hollow of his right cheek and pulls from him a sound of trilling, almost feline delight.

They sit in the porch swing. Mako holds Annie across his lap, her legs perpendicular to his, whereas Jem’s own lap is sacrificed to Donalbain, who swiftly stretches out and falls dead asleep. While Annie and Jem continue to swap pictures of him – him with his head plonked down on his keyboard at work; him scowling deeply at a Starbucks cup with the name “Marco” scrawled in messy Sharpie handwriting along the side; him swaddled in bedsheets and mere seconds into the day, eyes not even open yet; him shirtless at the stovetop, grinning at some smart comment that has since been forgotten – Mako lays his head against Annie’s shoulder, and then Jem’s, and then Annie’s again as he guzzles down his champagne and finds himself entering a new realm of intoxication: a bright, golden-colored drunkenness that chews with ruminant calmness at the back of his head, that fills him with a warmth that is nearly indistinguishable from the unbearable anxious heat that plagues him at night in bed and slightly earlier in the shower and yeah, pretty much everywhere, all the time for the past month.

“Look at him,” Jem says at one point, reaching over to brush his thumb over the rhombus of Mako’s cheekbone. His face, like Annie’s when Mako first came outside, is floral in nature. “Are you sleepy?” he asks, his hand going into the cloud of Mako’s hair. “Are you falling asleep?  _ Frère Jacques? _ ”

“Mmm,” Mako says.

“How many drinks have you had?” Annie asks. She glances at Mako’s glass on the balustrade and, finding it mostly empty, drags her finger along its wet inside and sucks on the thin sheen of champagne she’s procured.

“Three-hundred and eight,” Mako replies.

“He used to be so good at parties.” Jem is still lightly rubbing all over Mako’s face and head – gently pinching the loose skin of his cheek, thumbing at the corner of his mouth and into the thicket of his beard, pushing his fingers into the dark hair that curls just above his ear. “He used to bip and bop all over the place, talk to everybody, pace himself. Now he gets drunk in an hour flat and hides in the bathroom.”

“I used to hate myself and lack awareness of my mental illness,” Mako notes.

“And that’s different from now, how?” Jem shoots back, but he’s smiling when he says it, so Mako squeezes Annie to him and smiles as well.

When Mako’s blinks go long and tired, Jem kisses both of his cheeks and shoulders him back to the car. Of the Endymionites, they say goodbye to Annie alone, and delighted with their exclusionary rudeness she waves at them from the porch – Donalbain’s front left paw clasped in her waving hand – as Jem pulls the car south down Painters Street and Mako blows ethanol kisses out of the passenger side window. Tonight, Mako has the good grace not to get motionsick on the ride back home. He lays his head halfway out of the window despite Jem, from the driver’s seat, instructing him to, “Pull your noggin in, babe.” He catches stray glimpses of himself in the side-view mirror in the moments when he pulls his head up to show his face to the breeze or a tree or some hoodie-clad passerby on the sidewalk – his hair blowing lightly about his head, his eyes black planets of wired-tired confusion – and it is the information he gleans from these glimpses that he is referencing when, after Jem parks the car on the curb in front of Mum’s Hyundai and keys the engine off with a deft flick of the wrist, he sits straight up in his car seat and remarks, “I need a haircut.”

“Really?” Jem’s hand comes across the center console to press its fingers into Mako’s crown. “I think you’re cute with your hair grown out like this. You look like a lion.”

“I need a haircut,” Mako says again, lolling back into Jem’s touch and producing a deep, guttural sigh. “Can we go to sleep in here? I don’t feel like walking all the way to the house, and all the way up the stairs, and all the way to bed…”

“We’re going inside.” Jem reaches across Mako’s lap and pushes his car door open. Mako is too tired to argue with that.

The car whines pitifully when Mako nudges the passenger door shut. In the time since arriving at Jerri’s – in fact, in the time since leaving Jerri’s just over ten minutes ago – the air has cooled significantly enough to cut through Mako’s shirt as if it were made of gossamer, raising goosebumps along the skin of his arms and hardening his nipples into tight brown nubs. Jem returning to him his keyring, Mako’s fingers folding fondly around the stainless steel shark keychain, he leads the way through the gate, across the patio, and up to the front door, which he unlocks after about five minutes of struggling, cursing, and refusing to let Jem help him.

“Are you sure you don’t want me, the significantly less drunk party, to get it?” Jem asks from over his shoulder, snaking a hand around his torso to grab at the metal shark.

“ _ No _ .” Mako slaps at Jem’s hand, then lets out a quiet, half-exclaimed, “ _ Shit! _ ” when the key comes out of the frankly defective keyhole – the product of foundation settling more than his own inebriation, to be clear – and  _ clink-clatters _ to the ground, leaving him to sort through the whopping seven keys on the ring to find the house key once more. He manages to get the door open with no aid from Jem, save for the comforting pressure of the man’s cranium against his upper back.

Inside the house, it is dark excepting the multicolored fairy lights strung around the Christmas tree, silent excepting the low ticking of the living room analog clock. Stevie is an eyeless, soundless presence at the top of the stairs, her legs curled beneath her body. As soon as he hears the click in the door and the turning of its latch behind him, Mako is pulling his boots off, doubling at the waist to tug at his shoelaces and jerk the air-cushioned soles away from his tired feet. Jem’s hand finds the place between his shoulders.

“Hey, Mako,” he says, rubbing up to Mako’s nape and massaging the skin there. When Mako resumes full height to give him a questioning look, he kicks his own shoes off in a pile next to Mako’s, gives the other a soft pat on the cheek, and grins. “Race you upstairs.”

“In my own hou–  _ fuck you! _ ” Mako yells as Jem breaks into a run, disturbing Stevie from her sleepy perch atop the stairs with the loud  _ thump-thonk _ of his footsteps. He hears Mum holler up from her bedroom – a considerably pissy “What the hell was that?!” – as he vaults himself clumsily up the stairs and, reaching the top, shoves Jem into the wall just by the bedroom doorway. Unfortunately for Mako, the ricochet only brings Jem closer to the finish line, and they both end up making it to the room at the same time. 

“Win!” Mako exclaims.

“Bullshit.” Saying this, Jem yanks his sweater up over his head and strolls shirtless into the bathroom. “We both won, don’t even lie.”

“I’m not lying,” Mako argues. “We both won, hence: win.” 

While Jem rids himself of clothing in the bathroom, Mako does the same in the bedroom, dumping every garment save for his undies in a messy heap in front of the closet before finishing with his own body, thrown summarily onto the bed. He writhes and stretches in the center of the mattress, groaning as his joints gratifyingly  _ pop _ and  _ crack _ , then lets himself fall limp at the exact instant at which Stevie leaps up onto the bed and Jem appears in the bathroom doorway, wearing nothing but baseball-striped boxers.

“Oh, Mako,” Jem says in a sigh. “Oh, drunk, lovely Mako.”

Mako raises his arms as a wide, open circle. “C’mere.”

“Wait.” Jem retreats back into the bathroom and returns shortly with his phone in his hand. “I wanna put on that… really sexy 311 song you were dancing to yesterday in the kitchen.”

“If you think we’re gonna fuck while I’m like, six drinks drunk, you are  _ so  _ wrong, my dude.”

“I don’t, I just…” Jem drops his phone into the audio dock on the nightstand, out of which reggae rock begins to stream almost instantly. Turning the volume up so that the music is loud enough to be heard, but not so noisy that it disturbs, Jem finishes his sentence: “Wanted to get a vibe.”

Mako blinks curiously up at Jem. “A  _ sexy _ vibe?”

“A  _ vibey _ vibe.” With that, Jem snatches his glasses off, lodges them on the nightstand, and crawls into bed and into Mako’s now slack arms, taking care to avoid Stevie where she has made herself a spot alongside Mako’s left hip.

Finally, Mako cups Jem’s face in his hands and brings it to his to kiss. Jem, in the kind of sad, relieved way he had about him on his birthday and on earlier days and nights when Mako has come back to him after an extended period of anxious, or depressed, or plainly autistic distance from him, exhales all the air in his lungs into Mako’s slippery, drunken mouth and kisses back, soft and yet firmly enough to be felt as a blow of sorts. For long moments, this is all that exists: the expansive touch of their bare skin and Jem’s tongue laving gently at Mako’s chapped and stinging lips; Stevie purring, vibrating obliviously against the outward jut of Mako’s exposed hipbone; bastardized reggae, bass guitar and pretty metallic percussion; the New Orleanian creak of the house around them, speaking of the near-constant moisture in the atmosphere, the Bywater oldness of their habitat. When Mako pulls off for oxygen, to rub his face against Jem’s and breathe a Mexican gulf of tomato-grapey air into his right ear, Jem’s arms work against the mattress to wrap around his body, to squeeze him.

“Did you have a good time?” Jem asks.

“I almost died when Priya legit tried to kill Jerri’s dog.” Mako says this, then explodes in a long, body-quaking, nearly tear-producing laugh that bothers Stevie, judging by the way her unseeing head snaps straight up and her spine goes swiftly taut, but not enough to budge her. Once he is able to get his laughter under some control, he manages, between deep, breathless chuckles, to ask, “Have I ever told you that Priya and Jerri like, hate each other?”

“Only once every other week,” Jem replies into the corner of Mako’s mouth, which he kisses. “I still think we should have saved the dog.”

“Oh my God.” Mako jerks his head away to let out a high, crazy yowling noise, to cackle. “Can you, can you imagine if Priya actually killed him? Louisiana is the most litigious state in the country. Do you know how fast Jerri would have sued her ass and like, bought the magazine or something?”

Jem pivots leftward onto his side, using the leverage of his arms to bring Mako along with him. “Could you live with Jerri as your editor in chief?”

“ _ Fuck _ no,” is Mako’s kneejerk answer, but then he screws his mouth up in thought and adds, “Actually? Maybe. She really isn’t that much worse than Priya. She’s just condescending as hell, and that’s a lot less fun than straight-up alcoholism.”

“She wasn’t condescending tonight.”

“Oh, please! All that bullshit about her journey to the perfect cocktail? That was her roundabout way of like, looking down on all of us peons who refuse to go the extra mile for style like she does.” Throwing his leg over Jem’s hip, Mako  _ hmm _ s with pleasure when the man places a hand on his upper thigh and rubs there in turn. “You didn’t see her bathroom, mate. She had this massive naked picture of her just after she’d given birth, like Demi Moore did on the cover of Vanity Fair in 1991.”

Jem narrows his eyes across the scant three inches of space between their faces, vaguely amazed. “Honestly, Mako,” he says. “There’s no way you could have ever turned out to be anything but outrageously gay.”

“The more I drink, the gayer I get.” Mako digs his heel into Jem’s upper calf with an entirely expected viciousness. “Also you’re one to talk, man who has never had a child with a woman or considered marrying said woman, who has been in love with one man for literally half of his super gay life…”

“ _ Shhh _ .” Jem dives in to capture Mako’s mouth again, to kiss against his shuddering sigh and the little hiccupping laugh that escapes him. The house creaks on. Mako licks Jem’s teeth. Stevie resumes purring in her cinnamon roll configuration beside them.

Right in the middle of Jem’s probing kiss, Mako makes a sound like  _ mmngh _ and says, “Jackson said the weirdest, sweetest thing to me tonight.”

Jem draws his head backward to look Mako in the face. “He did?”

“Yeah.” Mako closes his eyes, curls his mouth into an easy, wistful smile. “He like, doesn’t really know anything about me. I don’t think he has the, uh, the attention span. But like, he does this thing where he just, makes me out to be the most magical person on Earth–”

“Because you are,” Jem interjects.

“Shut up, you’re so ridiculous.” Mako punctuates this with a feeble shove at Jem’s shoulder. “I’ve been a bitch on wheels for the past two weeks–”

“At least you know it.”

“I’m not magical.” At this admission, Mako opens his eyes to Jem’s calm, receptive, deeply loving face and instantly feels, with an inebriated intensity matched only in force by his own run of the mill bipolar emotional toing and froing, as if he is a salt-encrusted slug, an eggshell crushed beneath some cosmological boot heel. He doesn’t want to say it, he doesn’t want to be this dramatic, this adolescent, but still he leans his forehead into Jem’s and murmurs, “I don’t know why you love me at all.”

“You do.” There is Jem’s hand, dragging its knuckles up each knob of Mako’s spine. There is his breath, fanning coolly over Mako’s nose, cheeks, and mouth. “Just because you’re flawed and sick doesn’t mean you’re not smart, and talented, and loving, and hysterically funny–”

“I haven’t been any of those things for the past fourteen years,” Mako says, meaning it.

Jem’s responding grimace is, intentionally or not, full of mourning, his head propped at a wide obtuse angle against the pillows and his gaze skimming past the full, almost boyish apples of his cheeks to rake over Mako’s brown face. “I’m not having this conversation with you,” Jem says, and Mako doesn’t know it, has never known what has made the ugly, unappealing dips in the line graph of his life so tender and so worthy of Jem’s overwhelming and almost violent affection, but here they are, and here he is, listening to this: “You don’t get to beat yourself up tonight.” 

Mako, with lowered eyelids, simply breathes Jem’s air back to him. When the other’s lips pillow softly against the bridge of his nose and upward, he kisses back, presses his mouth briefly into Jem’s chin and concedes a whisper of a smile when the hair there tickles him.

Quiet pools between them. 311 fades out into a succession of reggae fusion sounds randomly picked out by Spotify: No Doubt, Sugar Ray, The English Beat, and – Mako’s long-term love – UB40. Mako, as he so often does wading through the internal haze of intoxication, feels tired without being sleepy, sluggish without being frozen. He watches, breathing slow and shallow, as Jem’s affectionate awareness gives way to the exhaustion appropriately called for by this long train ride of a Sunday – eyes closing for longer and longer periods, face glazing over, mouth ajar – and then, when he’s not quite entirely certain that Jem has finally fallen asleep, he murmurs, “Can I tell you something?”

Jem’s somnolent face pinches lightly in the middle. “I love it when you tell me something.” 

“Mum has cancer.” Having done this before with Kory, Mako doesn’t expect the gut-crunching, lung-collapsing sensation to hit him again, but, well, it’s been hitting him every night without fail for the past thirteen days. Suddenly breathing is a superhuman feat, speaking even more so, but he forces words out of himself regardless. “That’s what’s wrong. That’s why I’ve been so weird and awful. She told me two weeks ago and I–” Then Jem’s eyes are finally coming open, and Mako is tucking his face into the pillow beneath his head so he doesn’t have to see the other’s expression. “I’ve been going crazy, but it’s all good, you know, it’s fine. It’s fine. She’s going to be fine, she’s gone through this before. It’s fine.”

There is a long beat of silence in the wake of this confession, mediated only by the unmistakable groaning sound of the toilet flushing downstairs and the rhythmic  _ boof-boof _ of the neighbor’s Rottweiler-spaniel mix outside. When words enter back in, Jem is asking, in a pristine, almost featureless voice that forces Mako to swallow his anxiety, settle down in the halcyon furnace of his nerves, and look up to find Jem not quite so tired anymore, but just as painfully wide-eyed as he expected, “You’ve known this for two weeks?” Where one question has its serpentine head cut off, two and three and four more spring up in its place. “Why are you telling me this now? Why did she tell you and nobody else? Why didn’t you say something earlier?”

“I know!” Without warning, Mako is wide-awake and flying halfway up off of the mattress, startling Stevie into bushy-tailed consciousness with the commotion of it all. “I know, I’m so wrong, I haven’t told you that my mother has  _ cancer _ for  _ two weeks! _ I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t know why suddenly I’m doing so much apologizing, to you and to Kory and to, to myself, when it’s not my fault that Mum fucking–”

And then the words can come no longer, he is breaking off into a sob, and Jem is wrapped around his back as a sloth embracing a shaking tree trunk of darkly tattooed skin, muscle, bone, and hiccup-jerking viscera. As usual, Mako is held and Jeremiah is the one holding him. He is wrong and Jem adores him despite it. They are in love and nothing about it, it seems, has anything to do with what he has done for them, what he’s given to them. Twenty-two years of this and he thought things, thought he, would change a little.

They fall asleep clinging to one another. In the morning, neither of them can breathe. Watching Christmastime episodes of  _ Antiques Roadshow _ – gawking openly at archaic, hideous salt-servers and clocks set in the stomachs and flanks of ceramic potbelly pigs and brass hippopotamuses – Mako and Jem spend most of Monday under an afghan on the sofa-bed, blowing their noses into Kleenex and intermittently napping while Kory and Mum pass in and out of the room, Kory to wedge herself between their bodies and feed Mako dry Cheerios out of her hand, Mum to check their temperatures with the ear thermometer and bitch at them to change the channel every couple of hours while she reads Dean Koontz in her armchair. Jem doesn’t hide the heartbroken look on his face in her presence, the naked pain glinting out of his squinty eyes. In fact, he, an emotionally intelligent thirty-eight year old man, is worse at concealing this newfound knowledge of his – the open secret that now everyone in the household is aware of – than Kory is, and she just about bursts into tears every time she so much as looks at her grandmother. When Mum leaves to use the bathroom at around 11:27 AM, Mako lolls his thousand-pound head this way, fixes Jem with a good and hard stare, and says in an undertone, “Don’t say anything.”

Jem’s responding expression is a soft, sick little frown. “That’s really healthy.”

“The fuck do you know about ‘ _ healthy _ ’, Mister Rhinovirus?” Mako rolls halfway onto his left side to snag the box of Kleenex from the arm of the sofa. He pauses to expel what feels like a whole cranium’s worth of mucus into a once-folded tissue – blowing until there is plainly audible squeaking noises squealing out of his sinuses – then tucks the tissue for later use between his thigh and the sofa cushion. Squeezing Jem’s fingers when they find his below the afghan, he releases the quietest of groans. “We have to go to Walgreens later.”

“No we don’t.”

“Yes we do. I’m not surviving this cold without some Mucinex.” 

Mum comes walking her brisk, lively speedwalk back into the room on the very tail end of that comment. “Merry Christmas, am I right?” she says, giving her son and his partner a glib grin of bitter amusement. As she plops herself back down into her recliner, scooping up her novel where it has been left open, pages down, on the small glass end table and frowning openly at the thoroughly revolting solid gold dragon statuette currently being evaluated on the  _ Roadshow _ , she announces, in a tone that almost makes it sound as if the words are being delivered solely to herself, “You lot are going to have to go to Walgreens later, pick up some Mucinex.”

Like iron filings to a magnet, Mako and Jem’s gazes are drawn with a quickness to each other. Jem’s says something like, “I hate you so much." Mako’s, on the other hand, is all, “We can’t say no to the lady who has cancer,” and as the hours slip by and their heads steadily swell, throb, and drain with wet yellowish gunk, it turns out that they really can’t.

They wait until the obscenely hot December day fades into a cooler, though still quite balmy December night watched over by a grape-colored sky made zombified and fluorescent with light pollution and Rembrandtesque through a thick filter of fog. Kory decides to tag along for the short ride to the drugstore, to pile into the backseat in her slouchy house clothes and flip-flops and no, not actually enter the pharmacy with Mako and Jem, just sit back in the car with her smartphone and her lemon yellow earbuds. As soon as three-fourths of the household have holed themselves up in the Jetta and Mako has plugged his keys into the ignition, there is an overgrown moment of tension between them all – elephantine, almost pregnant with grief – that only ends when saxophone-screeching hip hop begins to emerge from the car speakers and Jem turns to Mako and says, so nasally it’s almost comical, “I can’t do this.”

Mako gives him a slack-jawed, hollow-eyed look of absolute fatigue. “Can’t do what?”

“Act like everything’s okay.” Jem sniffles loudly, and it’s so disgusting and so cute. “Like your mum isn’t just casually walking around with stage-whatever breast cancer in the middle of the holiday season.”

“I’ve been doing it for two weeks,” Mako says, craning his whole aching body around to glare directly behind him while he backs out of his parking spot on the curb and internally cursing Jem’s tendency to perfectly parallel park (while tipsy, at that) in spaces too small for him to easily maneuver the car out of. 

“Oh, yeah,” Jem says. “And that’s why you’ve been doing so freaking well as of late.”

Kory makes an airy noise of acknowledgement from the backseat. “Oh my God!” she exclaims. “Burn.”

“I can’t believe you would tell her to act like everything’s okay.” Jem sounds like a cartoon character, so the cutting force of his words is significantly diluted even as he jabs an emphatic thumb backward in Kory’s direction. “I can’t believe we’re literally spending Christmas like this. Lying to each other.”

“Is it still lying when there are three of us in on it?” Kory asks.

Mako doesn’t hear Jem’s answer, which is no doubt accurate as well as zingy. He doesn’t hear House of Pain on the radio or the background crunch of cracked asphalt and broken glass beneath the Jetta’s tires. He’s too busy zoning out, thinking to himself how much this affectionate flagellation he’s encountered by his love for the past month resembles the tough sort of loving treatment he was brought up in by his mother, who he will perhaps soon lose in horrifying and narratively significant fashion and whose adoration is so fierce and familiar to him he sometimes thinks it will make him lose his mind. Is it ironic or just practical that he’s ended up where he is now, with a person who loves him just as well and as bad and as plain hard as Mum does? Is it funny or just sad that he’s only now realizing it?

“Daddy?” Kory is asking him in her lovely, sweet voice, leaning suspiciously, dangerously far into the space between the driver’s and passenger’s seats, her hair brushing Mako’s short sleeve-covered shoulder and swaying with the car’s gentle yet jerky motion. Nearing the intersection of St. Claude and Louisa, Mako flicks on the Jetta’s left turn signal. 

“I’m going to say two things,” he announces, then destroys every ounce of his own menace by violently and cacophonously sucking all the mucus in his face upward through his nose. He produces a sharp, hacking cough, accepts the McDonald’s napkin Jem hands to him with a quiet, “Thank you,” one-handedly blows his nose, and then – and only then – continues. 

“One: if you don’t get back into your seat and buckle your seatbelt right now, Kora Mae, you’re not getting any Christmas presents.” When Kory gasps, he adds, “Just because this is the shortest car ride in the history of automobiles doesn’t mean you don’t have to buckle up.”

Silence, then the dull metallic sound of Kory’s seatbelt clicking safely into place.

“Two: we are going to wait until Mum talks about her cancer to us  _ as a family _ , and we are not going to argue about this.” Gripping the steering wheel white knuckle tight, he refuses to look at anything but the road, the languid procession of cars in front of and around him, the zombie grape night sky. “I’m not saying this because I don’t care about what everyone in this car is going through emotionally. Contrary to popular belief, I  _ do _ care–”

“ _ I _ never said you didn’t care,” Kory mutters.

“Let me finish,” Mako snaps, giving into the momentary urge to tightly shut his eyes with the utterance until he remembers that he’s driving and forces them open just as rapidly as he closed them. “I care. About all of you, Mum included. I care about the fact that this is painful and that it’s unfair that she chose not to share what was going on with you two and that made things awkward and weird and frustrating, and that I, like an idiot,  _ also _ chose not to share what was going on, and now that I have, that everything is just so upsetting that we can’t deal with anything, ever, in life, ever. I care, okay? And I’m sorry if everything I do is so hurtful or wrong – I’m just trying to take care of all of you and myself to the best of my ability and I don’t think I’m succeeding most of the time. I’m sorry for that, too. You, both of you, are literally everything to me, and that is, I know, the greatest joke the universe has ever played on anybody. I promise if Mum doesn’t say anything before she actually starts getting medical treatment I’m going to like, raise the cone of silence or whatever and both of you can do whatever you want and let Mum like, rip you and me to shreds – and I’m not even saying that passive-aggressively, I’m saying it genuinely. After Christmas, after the New Year, you both can be as emotionally liberated and healthy and whatever you want to call it as you want, and I won’t stop you. But for now, we’re doing this, we’re not saying anything, and we’re not arguing about it because if we do argue about it I’m going to kill myself two days before Christmas. That’s it.”

Both passengers are speechless in the moments immediately following Mako’s verbal deluge. They stay speechless a little while after those moments, too, letting everything inanimate and inhuman speak for them: the nighttime Yuletide Bywater, the sounds of the engine unconcealed by the Jetta’s old muffler, the silent and diaphanous fog all around, the sudden vibration of Mako’s phone in the cup-holder. As they roll to a stop at the junction of St. Claude and Franklin Avenue, Mako snatches up his iPhone and glances at the screen – broadcasting  _ rui ngata _ and that silly old selfie – moments before sliding his thumb across the screen to answer.

“Hey, Mum.”

“Are you there yet?”

“We just left the house.”

“Is that a no?”

Mako, overwhelmed with the task of talking and breathing through his nose at the same time, doesn’t answer, instead loudly clears his throat in the general direction of the dashboard. “What’s up?”

“I forgot to ask you to pick up some naproxen. I took the last two last night. Oh, and a bottle of wine.”

“Walgreens wine?” Mako asks, snorting with laughter despite himself.

“It’s good, it’s cheap,” Mum says, justifying. “I’ll pay you back.”

This, for some reason, breaks Mako’s heart. Frowning at the beige bumper before him, he replies, “You don’t have to do that. Red or white?”

“You know what I like.” 

“Couldn’t you have just texted me this?”

“I wanted to hear your voice,” Mum retorts, then hangs up, which is so much like her that Mako almost tosses his phone out of the window. Knotted and tangled in this desire, in the insane coppice of his cognitive anatomy, he presses right on past Walgreens and doesn’t even notice it – not until Jem’s hand alights on his mid-thigh and the man says, “You passed it, babe.”

Mako blinks, then swiftly whacks his own forehead with the flat of his left palm. “Shit, sorry, I’m… out of it. I hate driving.”

Jem doesn’t move his hand. “I could have driven.”

“No, no.” Mako swerves sharply amid the irritated honking of the SUV behind him to merge onto Henriette Delille. “You’re a poor, sick little baby.”

Jem uses his extended hand to pinch Mako. “You’re sick too, egg.”

“That and I need to pee so bad,” is Mako’s entirely nonconstructive response. When they finally make it to the pharmacy, everyone, even Kory, exits the car and folds themselves around him until they're all in some kind of strange clinging state in the middle of everything: the depressing gray parking lot, sick and wilting New Orleans, the warm white cloud that has settled over southeastern Louisiana, Christmas. This is what sorry looks like, Mako guesses. This is what family looks like.

The day before Christmas, Mum walks into the living room where Mako, Jem, and Kory are all half-asleep and enacting their mid-winter laziness in front of the Hallmark channel and says to them, “I want to tell you all something.” She sits on the edge of the sofa-bed, right alongside Mako’s feet, and puts her right hand firmly down on his shin – as an anchor, as a five-tiered root system. Mako knows what she’s going to say to them, so he doesn’t hear it, any of it. He just wraps an arm around Kory, lays his head down on Jem’s shoulder, and watches the Christmas tree until the fairy lights bloom and blur in his vision, gleaming so brightly they become one pretty rainbow mass, and then, when his eyelids fall closed, nothing.


	11. 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter makes references to incest. this is a very icky subject and it's taken directly from my own life. the way i've chosen to write about it in this particular story is partially but not wholly indicative of my sentiments on the matter; mako's feelings are related to but distinct from my own, and there will be other stories i write about the same subject that will have different takes on it.
> 
> also!! for the love of god, just because a character belongs to a certain demographic and does bad things at the same time, that doesn't mean that character is representative of their entire community. robbie is not emblematic of the trans or jewish community just because they're nb and jewish.

#  _ 11 _

For years, Mako has found the act of washing dishes therapeutic in its straightforward, methodical nature. A prune-fingered existence has always been a calm one in his book. He suspects this correlation between menial cleaning and blissful clearheadedness to have something to do with Nana Victoria, who he believes to be responsible in a very lasting way not only for the great deal of his admittedly limited skills of emotional modulation but also for nearly every accidental, kneejerk mechanism within him that happens to make his life easier, more functional than it otherwise would be. It’s Nana’s fault that he actually brushes his teeth every day, that he has brushed his teeth every day for the past thirty years and refused to let the relative strenuousness of the activity turn him off from it permanently. It’s Nana’s fault that he discovered so long ago the magical and anxiolytic properties of bathing and that the experience of bathing didn’t simply disappear into his horrifying mental landscape as something tactilely unbearable, horrifically aggravating to his hypersensitive perceptual system. It’s Nana’s fault that he (sometimes, when he’s good) tries for sleep at mostly appropriate times in the night and reserves his midday deathslumbers for those times when he’s feeling most acutely inhuman and wrong, that every day is not swallowed up by the bed, that he has a daytime existence at all. As far as Mako is concerned, he would be a retarded orangutan with no personal life, family, or social skills to speak of if it wasn’t for his dearly departed Nan. Today, while he scrubs bits of duck juice and rice dressing from the Christmas dishes left over in the sink, he thinks of her.

In the living room, Mum is speaking in Portuguese. “ _ Eu te amo para sempre _ ,” she says. “ _ Eu te amei para sempre. Eu te amarei para sempre. _ ” Mako can hear HGTV on in the background of her language lesson, can hear, when he strains, Kory playing a video game upstairs and Jem writing a song on his guitar the next room over. He grinds his sponge into a stubborn spot of grime left on one of the dinner plates. The pomegranate scent of the dishwashing soap fills his nose. Stevie, unexpectedly enough to make him jump a bit, appears at his bare feet and begins to wind her plump, furry body around his ankles – sniffing him delicately all the while in her delightful, unseeing way – and Mako is entertaining thoughts of putting the dishes down to pet her when Jem hustles into the kitchen with his abandoned and vibrating smartphone and says, “Someone’s calling you.”

Without looking up, Mako places the soapy dish he’s been working on into the second sink and replies, “Let ‘em go to voicemail.”

A beat passes, then Jem says, “It’s Aroha.”

As if he’s in a movie, Mako drops the ceramic plate lifted halfway out of the sink and there is a harsh clattering sound that sends Stevie flying out of the kitchen, her claws skittering quietly against the hardwood. Jem waits for him to dry his hands with the dishtowel draped over the oven handle before handing him his phone, leaning in to kiss him briefly on the cheek and then turning tail to head back upstairs. Mako grimaces, hard, then answers the phone.

“Hello?”

“Merry, merry Christmas, my resplendent darling man! My most wonderful mean-as shark baby!” Aroha’s voice coming over the line is as overwhelming as ever, her cadence all over the place, her captivating brassy timbre the auditory equivalent of a roman candle’s repetitive and magnificent detonation. Mako listens, confused but truthfully not that curious, to what he thinks is running water in the background of wherever and whatever Aroha happens to be doing, to the hollow echo that trails all of her words as she says, “What are you doing? Can we FaceTime? I just got a new phone and oh my God, baby, it’s  _ so fucking big _ , I feel like I’m carrying a television. I want to see your face!”

“Hold on.” His sympathetic nervous system suddenly in full overdrive, Mako doesn’t think as he passes out of the kitchen into Mum’s bathroom and closes the door behind him, as he climbs into the bathtub, leaves the shower curtain open, and sits with his phone propped up on his knees and held, still, between his fingers. He turns on FaceTime, then waits for Aroha’s exquisite brown face to appear on his decidedly not that televisionary screen. When it does, it is covered in a mint green paste and she is giving him a gorgeous smile from beneath the long, messy ponytail fastened high up on the back of her head. 

“Mako!” she shrieks. Her arms suddenly appear in her front camera’s field of vision as she does a shoulder-snapping, hip-popping dance of joy. “Merry Christmas, kiddo!”

Mako tries his damnedest to school his expression into something genuinely, yet only weakly amused. This particular afternoon, he actually manages to succeed at doing so. “You’re late,” is his dry, impassive response.

“I’m on New Zealand time,” Aroha huffs, dismissive.

“New Zealand is nineteen hours ahead.”

“Oh.” As if she’s been kissed, Aroha’s lips peel back to reveal a gorgeous, manically happy set of teeth. “In that case, I’m really fucking late.”

Mako, deciding he isn’t entertained, gives his camera a faint frown. “What’s up?” he asks. “I mean, why are you calling?”

He wants her to say she’s calling for Kory. He expects her to say he doesn’t know what. What comes out of her pretty, grinning mouth is this: “Can’t I call you every once in a while for no reason?” Then, as she rears back to stand up, her phone mysteriously stationary in front of her all the while, and literally begins to pull her striped tank top over her head to reveal her naked, tattooed body (Mako feels what can only be described as an internal slap when he spies his own doodly self-portrait still inked into the skin below her right breast): “I was thinking about you today. Earlier this week I went to a party – this little wine and cheese shindig thrown by Sam, have I told you about Sam? He’s my supervisor. I almost slept with him before I started working for the NZHS, but then he got married and I got my job and poof! Now he’s my supervisor. Anyway, Sam was throwing this party, this totally cute intimate thing for all of his associates and colleagues, and he had these  _ delicious _ margaritas –  _ really _ heavy on the tequila – and um, you know those big string lights? The ones with the actual globe-shaped bulbs? And it made me think about that party we went to for the state film commission right before we moved in together, when I was on Seroquel and you just wanted to paint and sculpt for a living.” 

By now, Aroha has stripped every article of clothing from her body in full view of her camera and carried her phone with her to her tub, where she sits chest-deep in crystal pink water and holds Mako in front of her on the dry, stable surface of a bath tray. Mako watches, slightly dazed, as she reclines against the bathtub’s porcelain side and loosens her messy ponytail only to fasten it again into a tighter, neater bun on top of her head. He clears his throat.

“You’re naked.”

Aroha smirks her lopsided, girlish smirk. “S’nothing you haven’t seen before.”

“Yeah, I’m just saying.” Mako leans back against his own shower wall, propping his elbow against the lip of the bathtub and then his jaw against his raised hand. “I could have used a warning before you just ripped all your clothes off. Isn’t that how we do things in polite society?”

“You and I have never been part of polite society, my love.”

This conspiratorial, affectionate language is always to be expected from Aroha, who loves him cutely and above all as a confederate, and still it catches Mako’s breath in his chest and keeps it captive there, surprising him when it so totally should not. In the whopping twelve and a half years since they separated, Aroha has never not been this: charming, ingratiating, impossibly and perpetually the most lovable woman on Earth; and Mako has never not in her physical or virtual presence been at least somewhat compelled to let her wrap his body all around her hands and fingers without fighting, to love her so much, so much it threatens to put him in material and psychological danger. 

There was a time when he thought they were capable of ending the world together. Now, he knows he was just a particular kind of insane.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi!” comes the cheery reply.

“Oh, yes, I’m so glad you asked about our daughter. She’s doing great, thank you again for asking.”

“Oh my God!” Aroha bounces momentarily in her bathwater, her verdant face alive with shock and delight, the water sloshing jubilantly about her body. “How is my magical little lotus flower? Did she have a good Christmas?”

Satisfied at having gotten Aroha to remember her own spawn for a moment (and, honestly, just pleased to be talking about said spawn at all), Mako allows his mouth to form the slightest and softest of smiles. “She’s okay. She’s going through this cute unicorn phase right now, so like, almost all of her presents were unicorn-related. A unicorn necklace, a unicorn sweater, a stuffed unicorn – she still hasn’t grown out of stuffed animals yet. I don’t know if I should be worried about that.”

In the time since Mako has begun speaking, Aroha has acquired a loofah, which she now uses to scrub at her underarms and the tender place beneath her breasts. She’s wearing a marginally devious expression when she tips her chin skyward – knowing, almost spiteful – and asks, “She’s not insane yet, is she?”

Mako makes the calculated decision to feign confusion. “What are you talking about?”

“Oh,  _ come on _ , darling.” Aroha brings her loofah up and around to her shoulders, to the elegant, swooping curve of her neck. Mako watches her cascade sudsy, pearlescent water over the skin there in glorious 1080p. “You’re crazy. I’m crazy. Your parents are crazy. My parents are– well,  _ were _ crazy. It’s just a matter of time, isn’t it?”

“I prefer not to think like that,” Mako says, lying with practiced ease through his teeth. “Also, hey. She might turn out to be a genetic miracle.”

“Since when are you so optimistic?” Aroha reaches a hand behind her and returns with a bar of pale soap. She nestles this bar against her loofah and rubs the two together, tilting her head sideways at Mako. “You never used to be so hopeful when we were together. At least, not after the kid was born and you so fantastically lost your shit.”

“We’re talking about this right now? You called me to talk about this?”

“No.” Aroha runs her front teeth briefly along her bottom lip, shelving her bar of soap behind her once more and then shamelessly moving to caress her breasts with her loofah and her hands. Her face – a perpetual mask broadcasting naughty intentions and a manic satisfaction with just about everything and everyone available to her – turns soft, almost faraway. “I wanted to tell you about the party.”

Mako blinks tiredly, yet sweetly into his front camera. As usual, he can’t puzzle out Aroha’s motives, yet nonetheless he says, “Tell me about the party.”

“It was at this gorgeous, gorgeous beach house in Pipitea. Remember how we used to drive there all the time and pretend like we had money and we were going to buy some property there? Well, I was actually  _ in _ one of those houses, Mako, and it was astounding.  _ Gorgeous _ . And um, you know how rich people’s houses are always super clean, to the point where they almost feel alien? That’s totally what was happening at this party, I adored it. It was like boho Star Trek: the house. I took Marjory with me. She was thinking about you too, for some reason. She told me on the way to the party, she said, ‘how’s Mako doing?’ and I looked at her like, ‘what are you talking about, where did that come from?’ So I guess she planted you in my head, like a… like a weird plant, like a shark plant. Oh God, I just thought of that summer when all we did was sit in your bedroom playing  _ The Sims 2 _ on your computer, and we had that thing, that cowplant thing in our Sims’ front yard. You’re like that cowplant, but a shark instead of a cow. Anyway. Sam is always flirting with me. He does it in front of his wife, I haven’t the faintest idea why. Marjory and I show up, right? And Sam answers the door and then, right in front of his very much pregnant wife, kisses me! On the lips! Do you remember that time we were having dinner with my boss when I was doing state work and he grabbed my ass when we walked in? Oh, I think about that night so much, Mako, it was marvelous. I’d never seen you so cool. I wonder what you’d have done if you’d accompanied me to this party. I always joke with Marjory and Ilse, I call them ‘my wives’ because I like to drape them on my arm when I go to events and such. If you ever come back to New Zealand, I’ll induct you as a member of my harem and take you to something, too. I can buy you a nice, tailored suit. Do you have a suit? I’m sure you do, I just get the impression that with your job it’s not really imperative that you have one, you know? Oh! Also! I almost forgot to tell you about the  _ food _ . Sam had this beautiful,  _ delicious _ kina roe, and like,  _ so _ much of it spread out almost like a perfect orange blanket on the buffet table. I fucking gorged myself, it was disgusting. I kept going back for seconds, and thirds, and fourths, until the caterer, he–” Aroha finally pauses, but only to release a sharp, snorting laugh. “He looked me directly in the eyes and told me, ‘If you come back to this table one more time, I’ll rip your friggin’ arm off.’ I thought it was so funny, I asked for his number. And he gave it to me! I haven’t called him yet, but I feel good about my prospects.” 

Throughout Aroha’s lengthy, nonstop, almost three minute-long spiel, Mako sits, listens, and makes appreciative expressions and noises such as  _ mmm _ and occasionally  _ uh-hunh _ when appropriate. He rolls his jaw against the heel of his palm and then, when the weight on his arm becomes taxing, shifts into an alternate position in the bathtub, leaning all the way back against the shower wall and grasping his phone with his hands held atop his knees. There is a dark, kind of petty, kind of middle-aged part of him that wants to disengage from this conversation completely, to put the phone down and go back to washing dishes, or watch  _ House Hunters _ with Mum, or lie down in bed and listen to Jem strum out postmodern audition for about ten minutes and then come back and find Aroha, no doubt, still talking, but he remains light and sweet and steadfast and listening, tuned in to every single word despite being, at some points, in literal physical pain at having to do so. He doesn’t know why he does it. Part of him feels, even years later, as though he owes Aroha the world. 

Aroha is rinsing the pretty green gunk off of her face now, making happy little moaning noises as she does so. This happiness of hers at her blithe age of forty is so disarming it makes Mako want to scream. It’s not fair, he thinks, that he should have done and be doing so much work to hold his life together – his job, his family, his long-term relationship, his personal mental stability – and she, after spending so long subscribed to a policy of absolute, carefree, dangerously reckless selfishness should come out still happier than he is, happier than he feels on a daily basis, at the very least. 

“What do you think I should do?” Aroha asks.

Mako furrows his brow. “About what?”

“About the caterer!” Aroha’s face, now bare, is even more radiant than it was when she first appeared on his smartphone’s screen – a perfect, heart-shaped locus of joy. “Should I play it really casual and cool or just totally tiger out on him?”

“‘ _ Tiger out _ ’?” Mako’s expression, already quite crumpled, screws up even further. “Also, how the fuck should I know, Aroha? I’m not invested in this, I really don’t care–”

“Tiger out: verb, to become an avid romantic and sexual hunter of one’s desired prey.” Aroha gives him a self-satisfied grin. “I came up with that one.”

“Ooh, good for you,” Mako says, not entirely sarcastically.

“And that’s sad, Mako!” The grin, carving out and revealing the precious dimples in Aroha’s face, suddenly turns into an affected, deliberate pout, her bottom lip stuck out all the way to Australia. “That makes me  _ really _ sad. I care about what’s going on in  _ your _ life.”

Mako cannot (or simply hasn’t the energy or the will, he can’t really tell) stop his eyes from blowing out in half-serious shock. “Oh my God! That explains why you asked me about it. I’m so glad you care so much that you asked me about my life, and that I told you about my life, because you asked about it–”

“ _ Stop _ , you’re so mean.” Seconds after Aroha raises a halting, dismissive hand, she drops it back into the bathtub with a soft  _ splash _ . “Tell me, then. What’s going on with you?”

Despite having made such a big deal about Aroha’s self-centeredness, upon being made the momentary focus of their conversation, Mako feels his skin ready to crawl right off his body in revolt. “Oh, God,” he says, rolling his head backward and his eyeballs along with it. “I don’t know. Nothing new. I wish I had something to tell you but I really don’t.”

Outside of the bathroom, Mum’s telltale, heavy-footed gait passes down the hallway in the direction of her bedroom. Aroha narrows her eyes into her camera.

“I don’t believe you.” She crosses her arms, flicking her flyaway hairs out of her lovely face with a smart jerk of her head. “I think you’re living it up up there and you just want to keep it from me out of spite. What New Orleans shenanigans are you tangled up in, young man? What glorious day-drinking? What after-hours hijinks?”

“Honestly? Sleeping in the middle of the day and grocery shopping every week or so.” Mako’s face is a tired, impassive reflecting pool. “Sorry to disappoint.”

“Are you happy like that?” There is genuine, tenderhearted curiosity in Aroha’s tone, in the pale, almost silvery glint of her irises, the way she draws her fingers thoughtfully down the valley between her breasts.

Mako raises his shoulders in brief shrug. “I don’t know,” he says again. “I don’t think happiness is the point, is it?”

“But  _ of course _ it is!” Aroha exclaims, and the difference between them has never been so plain since they broke up. “What is life at all if you’re not breathlessly, deliriously happy, or at least trying to be?”

Mako wants to say so many things: family, comfort, hard work, stability, experience. Instead, he keeps his mouth shut and lets Aroha speak, listening to her the way he’s almost always listened to her: captivated, cut to the core, and convinced simultaneously of her utter rightness and total wrongness.

“I don’t know how you even get up in the morning. What’s the point of living if everything you have isn’t going into your sustained, unmitigated happiness? Into nearly destroying yourself with glee? You know, sometimes you just break my heart, Mako. You used to be so much more  _ alive _ , so filled with joy. That’s why I loved you, I think. You were the only person I knew who was gunning for such perfect bliss as much as I was. I remember you first thing in the morning – I dream about you that way, in fact – when you’d open your eyes as if you were waking up to the first day of your life, every single day, and you were just this perfect, perfect baby always ready to take the whole world into your mouth like, like communion.” Aroha stares directly into her camera at that moment, fixing Mako with her gaze across eight-thousand miles of space and untold quantities of psychological time. She smiles. “I miss you like that. I miss you, period.”

Mako swallows around the lump that has suddenly emerged, painful in its size and its swiftness, within his throat. “I miss you, too,” he replies, halfway between thinking it, feeling it, and just reimbursing it as an empty, really beautiful sentiment back to her, the mother of his child, the once-love of his life, the most wonderful woman on Earth. It is in moments like these that he wonders if their relationship ever could have survived, knowing within his most realistic and paternal self that the answer is a resounding no, yet adoring Aroha and her way of so lovingly shitting all over him so much that once upon a time, he made life with her. Almost married her. Might have been his happiest if not his best self due to the sheer, relentless influence and pressure of her. Saying the words “I miss you” in light of all this is almost enough to break his brain in two.

After getting off the phone, Mako abandons the dishes entirely and picks his way upstairs. There is a moment where he stands between Kory’s room and his own, listening to the musical sounds coming from each and contemplating his path. Overtaken with abrupt and profound yearning, he detours to the left and puts himself in his daughter’s doorway, peers in and finds her sitting cross-legged at the foot of her bed playing PlayStation 5 on the television atop her short, squat bookcase. 

“Hey, baby girl,” he says.

“Hi,” she says, not tearing her eyes away from her game.

“Do you mind if I come sit with you?” he asks. “Just for a little while?”

Finally, Kory raises her gaze to his. Her smile is so like the one her mother gave him mere minutes ago. “No,” she replies, then scoots from the center to the right side of her mattress. When Mako, immediately after prostrating himself next to her, reaches over to fiddle with the end of her high ponytail and pull on one wavy tendril of hair until it is stretched entirely taught and straight, she swings her own hand over to smush against his softly smiling face and says, “You have to be good.”

Laying his head down briefly against Kory’s thigh, Mako murmurs, “Okay.” He watches her play  _ Kingdom Hearts II _ until it’s time to do something about dinner.

He and her mother met sixteen years ago, him newly coming off of his whirlwind existence as a undergrad creative at Victoria U, her a graduate student wildly dancing her way through a doctoral program that she was so beautifully and crudely making her bitch. Theirs was a love that flowered into being with the immediacy and the violence of an explosion – nuclear love, train tracks love, love that didn’t make sense to Mako at the time and even still doesn’t quite add up in retrospect, how sudden and fierce it was.

The place was called, in most dramatic fashion, Valhalla. Mako used to frequent the live music spot with his mates in his university days – walking the sixteen minutes or so from the Kelburn campus with Jem and Tatum and Quick and no, not Loren, who was such a homebody from such an early age it was almost painful, but new friends like Stuart and Stephani and Jami at his sides and in front of and behind him in a small, talkative cloud that moved with almost manic speed down the sidewalk. On this Thursday in early summer, however, everybody in their novel adulthood was a slave to boring dinner plans and healthy circadian rhythms, and Mako was consequently made to go to Valhalla alone; made to take Taranaki from his and Jem’s big-windowed bungalow on Hargreaves with no one to match his steps or take potshots at his crazy floral button-down or promise to get him safely home after his sixth or seventh drink; made to bid Jem an overdramatic, wide-eyed goodbye in the pretty cedarwood doorway, juggling his keys from hand to hand and telling the other, “You’re going to regret not coming.” In retrospect, Mako doesn’t think meeting Aroha would have been the same if he hadn’t been alone.

She came to him from within a feverish crush of bodies, sound, and air that tasted heavily of ethanol. Valhalla that night was the domain of a Gorillaz/A Tribe Called Quest/OutKast cover band called Zoo Sounds. On a gritty concrete dancefloor that had seen so many feet and been eroded by years and years of sweat-drip and sheer pressure – so much so that it had transformed from a manmade floor into what might have passed as natural terrain – Mako had danced, surrounded by countless others and yet all alone for all intents and purposes, churning his hips, twirling like a woman, this way and that way, grasping a Speight’s in one hand and cupping the empty air like a lover in the other, so purely and happily trapped in the moment that only something truly exceptional could have taken him out of it – and take him out of it she did.

He saw her clearly when she materialized at his side – her every feature fine and crisp, her every movement articulated. Among the generic side-stepping, heel-jumping, and arm-swaying of his fellow dancers, she emerged as unique, refusing as Tatum had four years prior to fade into the background of Mako’s awareness, to be anything but the singular focus of anyone and everyone looking – this, to her, made the dancing more pleasurable. Out of her body, she fashioned an extra-strength rubberband – twisting, torqueing, flinging her limbs, her hips, and her head this way and that, long hair flying wildly through the air, body shining with sweat, Mako lost in the spectacle of her, anxious to match her energy with his own. 

She looked at him mid-twirl and, through the damp tendrils of hair whirling about her face, smiled with all of her teeth.

He could have been anybody, but he was him – so silly love song lucky to be at this place at this time.

He smiled back and let the music turn his body around clockwise, further into her orbit, hoping gravity would stick them together.

She grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him to her, and then they were gone – floating above the Earth as the Kiwi Venus and Mars. 

It was the first and probably only time in Mako’s life that he had ever clicked with someone without speaking to them, that simple coexistence had been enough to herald love. At the time, he believed this was the ever-elusive sign people talked about so much – the premonition of flawless compatibility; true romance; a wedding in spring; two children of opposite sexes; silver, gold, and diamond jubilees in the years to come – but in the crushing aftermath, it became clear that a drugging cocktail of alcohol, loneliness, and his and Aroha’s similar and spectacular charisma was to blame for their instantaneous connection. This made it all no less special.

“Feel Good, Inc.” gave way to “She Lives in My Lap.” Without kissing, Mako and the woman he’d so stupidly and so swiftly fallen for (just the way he’d fallen for Tatum, lightning-struck and kind of dumb because of it, as predictable as his heterosexual tendencies were and always have been) pressed their faces together and let their arms – his looped loose about her hips, hers wound like vines over the breadth of his shoulders and the nape of his neck – and their pelvises – the out-jutting bones pressed together, his nestled against hers as God and biology intended – do all the talking for them, both of them full of nerve, low on misgivings, caramel-colored and just as savory-sweet. How electric they were, how elemental – the rhythmic, tectonic grind of him against her, her against him; the almost secret exchange of overheated breath; the slickness of sweat and the press of wet foreheads together; the warmth of non-kissing, of perpetual mutual watching. Then, the music devolving into the erratic psychedelic squealing of saxophone, trumpet, and angry electric guitar, Mako heard a name being shouted through the cacophony – “Aroha!” – and without warning, his airy-fairy woman pulled away enough to look him dead in the eyes, said some word he couldn’t hear over the noise, leaned in to touch their mouths together without puckering her lips, and then disappeared as if into pure vapor, leaving his body paralyzed and cold in a room that felt as though it was eight-hundred degrees. Mako was not so ridiculous as to wonder if she had been real at all, but he was quickly taken by the conviction that her leaving signified the end of their association. Experiences as intense as their being together were rarely meant to last for long; of course she’d gone away before they could collectively spiral off into the uncontrollable and unprecedented.

So, Mako danced alone and a little sad until his beer bottle was hollow and Zoo Sounds announced a five-minute intermission. He went to the bar and bought another drink, texted Jem the whimsical thoughts of syrupy 11:00 PM inebriation. He stepped outside to smoke a Winfield, to stand on the sidewalk out of the way of passersby alternating sips from his Speight’s and puffs off of his menthol. He was halfway through the latter when out of Valhalla stumbled the woman he guessed was named Aroha, her previously untamed hair newly piled atop her head in a haphazard bun and her right arm threaded through the left arm of another young lady. 

“Oh my God, I feel like my head’s about to fall off,” she was saying, laughing along with it. She snorted when she laughed and there could not have been anything more adorable than that.

“I’ll pick it up,” the other woman replied, clearly the only thing supporting Maybe-Aroha while she clung to and hung off of her side. “I’ll like, use your hair as a strap and carry it around as the coolest purse ever.”

“My head would make  _ such _ a dope purse.” It was then that Maybe-Aroha locked eyes with Mako, the man she’d all but danced with like her new husband not half an hour before. Her face abruptly flooded with light. “Holy fuck! It’s him!”

Feeling silly, Mako spread his arms – beer going one way, cigarette going the other – and cried out, “It’s me!”

Maybe-Aroha closed the distance between them by skipping on over, abruptly as balanced and poised as a ballerina; as soon as she stood still directly in front of him, however, she began to totter and keel dangerously across the pavement, spurring Mako on to reach out with the hand that held his cigarette and tightly grasp her arm. She gave him a sparkling grin of thanks, then lurched further into his personal space to do as she’d done before: push her lips into his without actually following through with a kiss, the act imbued with distinctly middle school, secret handshake qualities.

He looked at her, his eyes twin question marks and her face that most overwhelming arrangement of opaque shapes and indiscernible planes that anyone, everyone new inevitably became. “Did you ever learn how to kiss?” he asked. He was so bold in those pre-medication, pre-therapy, drinkingest, druggingest days.

Maybe-Aroha squinted into his face with a smile playing around the edges of her mouth. “I learned.” Her breath, fanning lovely over his features in the warm December air, smelled of booze and vague, translucent desire. “Haven’t you ever heard of a pre-kiss? A kiss before a kiss? I don’t even know you, dude. What if you’re undeserving of my unadulterated kiss?”

“Aroha, come on,” the other woman called out, standing with her hip cocked out and her purse slung across her body on the edge of the sidewalk several feet away. “Leave that guy alone and let’s go home, alright?”

“She’s fine,” Mako said at the same time that Aroha whined, “I wanna  _ stay _ , Marj.” Mako brought his hand up to stick his cigarette between his lips, his mouth brushing the inside of Aroha’s wrist with the action; smiling wide all the while, Aroha announced, “I’m making new friends.”

Mako could barely perceive Marj’s mouth turning down at the left corner. “How are you gonna get home?”

Pulling out of Mako’s grip, Aroha twirled around to face her friend and shrug. “Who knows?” she said. Standing unsupported, she fast began to tip and stagger to the side; Mako grabbed the back of her sweater and, feeling like a pure scumbag, admired the way the wide neckline came down across her shoulders which shone beneath Valhalla’s yellow halogen lights.

Marj refused to budge for all of ten seconds, engaging Aroha in a Western-style standoff with her legs slightly spread, her hands on her hips. When she spoke again, it was to offer a miffed, “Alright,” and then turn away, start heading down the street. “I’ll leave your car if you feel like driving.”

In Aroha’s state, Mako doubted she could do anything of the sort without winding up heavily injured or with a mean case of vehicular suicide. Still, Marj walked away with a sort of irritated rapidity to her steps, and he was left alone with Aroha, holding her up at her back like some gorgeous ventriloquist’s puppet. She heel-toed her way back against the brick wall Valhalla had painted black, rolled her shoulders into its dark late night griminess and nestled herself into the easy curve of Mako’s arm. To any bystander, the two of them looked just like a couple, like they’d known each other for happy months if not years.

“Hi,” said Aroha, turning to look at Mako with heavy-lidded eyes. She reached across his body to take from him his Speight’s, then, raising it to her lips to sip, asked, “You gotta name, stranger?”

“Mako.” Mako admired the left side of her head, the hair closely shaved there, her clear enunciation of every word in the face of her obvious intoxication. “You’re Aroha.”

“I am.” She lifted the lip of his beer bottle to his mouth and, when he opened up, tipped the whole vessel upwards to pour bitter brew down his gullet. “ _ Kei te aroha tou whaea ki te ika? _ ”

Surfacing, Mako replied, “Yeah. _ Ko ia i ako e pā ana ki a ratou i te kura. _ ”

“Oh, so she’s a scientist?” With this utterance, Aroha rolled her words around like marbles in her mouth, their phonemes all round and husky and melty like room temperature ice cream. She swung the hand holding Mako’s Speight’s around thoughtlessly, knocking it with alarming force against the brick wall but, surprisingly, not shattering it. “Are  _ you _ a scientist, Mako?  _ Makō iti? _ ”

“No.” His cigarette having been burning near Aroha’s hip through the span of their conversation, Mako flicked the smoldering butt away and momentarily watched it skitter across the sidewalk. Then he smiled. “I’m part of the most useless societal caste.”

“You’re a politician?”

Mako produced an embarrassing, honking laugh. “No,” he said between chuckles. “I’m an artist.”

“Well,  _ that’s _ not useless.” Aroha swayed away from the wall, moving to stand in front of him while he held her still upright, his hands carefully bracketing her waist. She affected a full-body shiver, leaned in so that she was pressed to him collarbone to pelvis, and murmured, “I’m restless. Can we go back inside and dance some more? I like your moves.”

“I like your moves, too.” This exchange struck Mako as particularly dumb and cutesy in the manner of a romantic comedy (which, as a useless actor, he loved). “Yeah.” He gently knocked his forehead against Aroha’s. “Let’s go dance.”

So, they danced, wild and unrestrained. They drank until the room did all manner of tropey cinematic things like sway and pivot and shake and blur. They danced some more. They nearly shut down the bar. Thirty minutes before Valhalla’s closing, while the bartenders and audio technicians breathed blatant sighs of relief, Mako walked Aroha to her car three Wellington blocks down and catalogued as much about her as time and his altered state of consciousness allowed: her messy South Island upbringing, the gold and silver rings on the fingers of her left hand, her longstanding love-hate relationship with high-heeled shoes (including the candy apple red pumps she’d been wearing that night, which she then held in her hand, risking tetanus and dirty soles), and – most pertinently – her ballooning interest in him, which was apparent in the way she held his hand tight while they walked and said things such as, “I’m so glad I actually ran into someone cool tonight,” and, “I like you. You remind me of myself.”

Standing alongside her dusty Porsche Carrera on the corner of Vivian and Tory Street, colored amber under the nearby streetlamps and positively reeking of snark and good, cheap beer, Mako looked down at Aroha – took in the mohair of her sweater, her sea-wavy hair dancing in the wind around her head, and the blue opal set in her nose ring – and of all the things swirling bloody and heady around in his head at that moment, the first thing that made it to his mouth was, “Can I touch your tits?”

Aroha grinned at him, light shining out of her face. “You really are lit, aren’t you?”

He, punch-drunk, had chuckled sheepishly in reply. “Yes, I am.”

Then, less than twenty-four hours into their acquaintanceship, Aroha had kissed the tips of her fingers and pressed them to Mako’s lips, which he’d promptly puckered. She used the Sharpie in her cup holder to write her phone number down on the inside of his forearm. After driving him back to Hargreaves Street, she let him lean across the gearshift, push his mouth into the hollow of her cheek, and breathe booze against her skin until she shook with laughter. Only then did she actually kiss him on the mouth, murmuring, “You’re worth it. You’re worth it.”

It was a moment Mako would always look back on as distinctly literary. He’d been drunk, sexually confused, and several weeks into his post-university quarter-life crisis, in which he oscillated wildly between wanting to continue the moderately successful but overly uncertain life he’d been leading in Wellington and yearning to just run back to Raukokore, where he’d live in the old farm house and subsist on goat cheese until his inevitable death via emphysema caused by smoking unfiltered tobacco and marijuana cigarettes. She’d been in gold hoops, had an undercut and a nose piercing, was wearing a fuzzy pink sweater that would have been the epitome of fashion forwardness in the decade prior, and had a smirking, heavy-lidded look about her that suggested a propensity toward mischief and getting into much-enjoyed trouble. At the time, looking at her was, to Mako, like gazing directly into himself and seeing everything rough and sharp-edged and encrusted with gold leaf there; like looking at the girls in high school he’d mutually eyeball before driving off with Jem in the middle of study hall without a word of interaction; like being twice as intoxicated as he already was; like kismet. He had known then that so much of Aroha’s appeal to him laid in her uncanny power to dazzle and the fact that she had torn into him at a time in his life when all he’d really wanted was to be torn into, dragged down, and ruined, and, wonder of wonders, he didn’t care. When she laughed at him, he felt like he was dying; when she kissed him, he could have done it for real.

He woke the next afternoon at 3:13, hungover and confused, and found the ink on his arm smudged but still present. He quickly transferred AROHA • 22 052 4302 onto a piece of paper, then went to tell Jem about the night he’d had.

“I want to talk and be talked to,” Aroha liked to say. “I want to tell you  _ everything _ .” She was a girl who, at the age of fourteen, rode her bike through Oamaru with Kym Hurley the bowlcut kid and entertained protofeminist, riot grrrl leanings. In the still of the night, she’d climb out of her bedroom window to hang with Dylan Weiss, Kym, and the sweetest, nameless boy from third period gym, who knew how to circle his fingers just right against the nub of her clitoris and bought her coconut-flavored ice blocks from the corner store on the condition that she sucked him off first (maybe he wasn’t so sweet after all). 

She gave her life to Mako in bits and pieces. Some things, Mako only ever knew in part; others, he had no knowledge of whatsoever. He knew that Aroha grew up in a two-bedroom house in the largest town in North Otago on the South Island, her father’s wild child and the prettiest, smartest, everythingest girl in a fifty-kilometer radius. He knew that her mother offed herself two months after her birth, sipping a potent cocktail of postpartum depression and bipolar psychosis. He knew that her father, the semi-legendary Taika Ihimaera, master carver and alcoholic extraordinaire, fancied Aroha his favorite creative subject and so proliferated her lovely wooden face throughout the South Island as she grew, giving her eyes of malachite and mother of pearl and lips of mahogany that didn’t quite match her flesh and blood mouth in sharpness and smartness. He knew that the tree of Aroha’s own mental illness planted its roots deep into the ground and had interlocking branches with her father’s tree, her mother’s, Ihimaeras going back generations that so resembled the Ngatas of Raukokore. 

He didn’t know the extent of Aroha’s childhood freedom. Days spent doing as she pleased, walking herself to school, standing on her little stool at the stove to fry eggs with cheese, drinking beer and breezing through her homework on the roof of the house while the boy in the street yelled inane conversation up to her.

“Eh, Aroha!”

“What, fucker?!”

Kai, who had begun to fill out in the arms and trunk when he was only nine, looked just about as big as a truck at thirteen. He had a round face and wide eyes always searching for Aroha, fixed upon her like twin beacons in the dying light of the New Zealand afternoon. “Why don’t you come down? I’ll get you chocolate fish.”

“So what, I can suck your pencil dick for two seconds and then you’ll come in my face?” It had been awhile since Aroha could call herself truly naïve, could pour herself out unspoiled and white like fresh milk. She had been through the sexual awakening ushered in by the sixth grade, which necessitated making out behind the lunchroom and practicing kissing with Kym when there were no adults supervising; the nights spent watching her father’s “big tits”, “orgy”, and “amateur” pornography while he snored like a foghorn, dead to the world the next room over; the trauma of a drunk grown man crawling into her bed and getting up in all of her crevices, whispering, “Shh,” and “You smell good, girl”; sessions with the guidance counselor, who called her, to her vehement disagreement, an “abuse victim” and “in need of help.” To Kai, Aroha flung her index and middle fingers into the air. “Fuck off!”

“Aw, come on, girl! You’re so mean!” Kai had kicked a pebble in the street then, let its opaque  _ clatter _ reflect his awful, unbearable disappointment with her, the most difficult chick in Oamaru. “I don’t want anything from you. Can’t I just spend some time witchu?”

“Yeah, that’s what they all say, eh.” Aroha glanced at problem seven on her math worksheet and, without really thinking, scribbled in the correct answer:  _ a = 149 square units _ . “You’ll want more soon enough. All men do.”

“I’m not a man,” Kai said, and this coming from the mouth of a thirteen year old Maori – who was, by all accounts, supposed to puff his chest out and call it manly, dream macho and walk macho and act macho until five years later he was the picture of practiced, perfect manhood – took Aroha by surprise. “I’m just a lonely boy.”

Aroha peered down at him, his bare skin shirtlessness, his big doe eyes. She flicked her hand sideways, dismissive. “Go away, flea. Come back when I give a shit.”

She finished her math worksheet and climbed back into her bedroom, then went downstairs and outside. Kai was waiting for her; he took her back to his mother’s house and watched her eat leftover takeaway fish and chips, her starving for the past six hours and left, as usual, up to her own devices.

Aroha was a girl who, at the age of sixteen, sung her pothead father to sleep after he’d drank himself into a stupor, tracking old heartbreaks and strumming sad songs on their shared ukulele. In the still of the night, she’d lie in bed with him, dragging her fingertips over the swirling, pointing, boomeranging  _ tā moko  _ inked into the skin of Taika’s arm and reflecting, in her own teenage way, on how this man was her best friend (her best friend in the entire world, not really her father at all, in fact). 

Sometimes she fed Mako seemingly inconsequential anecdotes of her early life, thinking of them as funny, cute stories rather than wholesale reflections of the sort of fucked up state of her childhood and adolescence. How she started her period in the middle of Ms. Partridge’s gym class and had to pool her limited funds with Kym and Jean Wozniak’s to buy a box of tampons from the North Otago Pharmacy. How her best friend after Kym was named Moana, and all the Pakehas took such pleasure in calling her  _ Moan _ -a and making all kinds of vile sex jokes about her. How, when she started high school, she went out with Colleen Wirihana – a Maori girl with a navel piercing, a sparkly polyester jacket from the ‘80s that used to belong to her mother, and a particularly vicious way of fucking her with her fingers – and Tomairangi Kirkwood – a likewise Maori guy who played in a shoegaze garage band, had stick-and-poke tattoos on his left arm, and cheated on her with the captain of the volleyball team, compelling Aroha’s own conversion from punk rock queen into girl jock supreme. How, experiencing her first manic episode, she beat her girlfriend’s face black and blue in her senior year and barely managed to graduate despite the valedictorian perfection of her grades.

Mako was never told the story of Aroha’s stab at armchair dentistry: the day she’d been forced to pull her father’s broken, rotten bicuspid out of his mouth after he’d spent the last of the month’s money on the rent and her fifteenth birthday party.

“Be still, Daddy,” she whined, standing between Taika’s legs with a penlight tucked into her mouth and a pair of pliers in her left hand. Her right, she used to hold her father’s mouth open, her fingers forming a  _ u _ between his maxillary and mandibular teeth. 

“I’m tryin’, hon.” Taika jerked away to pick the bottle of scotch up off of the bathroom floor, which he then pulled generously from. “I’m just–” He sipped again, and the amber liquid sloshed audibly, soothingly. “Need to get rid of these jitters. M’nervous.”

Aroha took the penlight out of her mouth and gave her father an irritated scowl. “You wouldn’t have to be nervous anymore if you just let me fucking  _ do it  _ already.”

Taika glared right back at her. “ _ Kei a koe he mangai paru, kotiro _ .”

“ _ I ako ahau mai i a koe _ .”

“ _ Tō tara _ .”

Aroha ignored him, returned the penlight to its interlip position, wrenched her father’s mouth as wide open as it would go, and positioned the jaws of the pliers around the blackened tooth jutting downward out of his maxilla like an ugly, stubby stalactite. In the aftermath, she drove him to Fat Sally’s Pub and Restaurant to meet and get smashed with his similarly alcoholic friends, then went to pick up Katy Zorn so they could get dinner at the Indian spot on Thames.

“Have a good time,” she said to Taika as he ducked out of the family car – a piece of shit Mustang that would be entirely obsolete within the next three years. When he offered, she took his half-smoked cigarette and put the butt between her lips. “I’ll swing by after dinner.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Taika, still bleeding liberally from the mouth, made a wet sucking noise and gave her a pained, grotesquely crimson smile. “Love you.”

“Love you, too.”

When she got ready to leave Oamaru, Aroha said to herself she’d miss her daddy the very most. She danced in the living room with him, whiskey drunk, and put him to bed with a tenderness that suggested she would never see him again after she disappeared into the north. Perhaps, in some way, she didn’t want to see him again. Missing him was maybe the most natural feeling she’d ever felt.

Aroha was a girl who, at the age of eighteen, had trouble saying no when she felt wanted in the right way. In the still of the night, she lived with her awareness of the dreadfulness of men as it coexisted with her insatiable desire to fuck them – refusing to sleep in their dorm rooms at Victoria U and yet lying awake for hours in their beds being touched and petted and pampered until morning, upon which she’d go back to her own apartment and fry bacon with Noelle Brown to the sounds of heavy metal (Black Sabbath most days, Deep Purple if they were feeling something a little more obscure).

She loved to tease Mako with the details of her past relationships – not because she thought of them as important, formative influences (in fact, Aroha thought of nearly nothing as truly important, save for her own sustained happiness), but because she so adored the idea of him being wild with jealousy, of trying to outdo her ex-lovers in sexual and romantic prowess, her a being as deeply sexualized as she was, unable to escape it, consumed by her lust. There was Frances Wolff, the opinionated psych major who introduced Aroha to the wonders of tribadism. There was Adrian Maddox, a crybaby of a sociology major who was so soft and so good in bed that Aroha could almost (almost) deal with his desire to wife her up. There was Ocean Rangihau, the bartender she started seeing in grad school who, in all likelihood, was just a big muscle gay who adored Aroha for her wildness more than anything else. There was Serena Paki, the jewelry-making Virgo from Upper Hutt who only loved Aroha in the bedroom, stroking and breathing and kissing all over her. They almost ran off to Germany to get married, can you believe it? This did not strike Mako as odd. 

It did not strike Mako as odd that Aroha spent the summer before she met him in Mexico, studying the axolotl and practicing problematic habit-formation that would last her a lifetime. She was not what she would call a user, but she spent nearly every night in Central America drinking tequila at the bar adjacent to her motel, dancing with locals and telling sexy stories in her broken Spanish; every following morning popping Adderall given to her by her professor in order to get through the day’s work, holding his hand on the  _ trajinera _ to Lake Xochimilco.

“I want you to work for me when we get back to Wellington,” Dr. Callahan – who Aroha had recently begun to call simply “Ben” – said to her, passing her a bag taken out of the rubbish bin in his room’s adjoining bathroom. 

“Yeah, right.” Aroha knew better than to be gullible. She knew Ben wanted her close to him and why, and despite the special, situational kind of trust that then existed between them as two voyagers and scientists in a foreign place, she’d gotten the distinct impression that with their return to New Zealand would come the arrival of a relationship dynamic that would not welcome the particular sort of interpersonal laxity, of hand-holding, hair-brushing, bolero-dancing-in-the-black-and-blue-dark familiarity that the heat and strangeness Mexico had caused them to cultivate. She was smart. She was vomiting pure liquid into a plastic bag, but she was smart.

“I’m serious,” Ben said. When the  _ trajinera  _ driver glanced back at them with a vaguely worried look on his face, Ben shook his head dismissively and put a warm hand on Aroha’s upper back. “You about done?”

Aroha groaned. “I think I’ve got… maybe one more in here.” Sure enough, within two minutes, she was gushing tequila and stomach acid into her bag, after which she washed her mouth out with the bottled water Ben stored with an almost paranoid meticulousness in his backpack. She took two Adderall from her professor’s open hand and anxiously awaited the onset of improved cognition, the enhanced working memory and increased levels of arousal.

“You’re an excellent study,” Ben was saying, rubbing his thumb over the back of her hand in small circles. “You’re sharp as a tack. I’d love to have you as my research assistant.”

“Why? So you can seduce me? So you can have me on your desk as a glorified paperweight?” Aroha, despite the severity of her tone, interlaced her fingers with Ben’s and let his digital stimulation soothe her amidst the slow rocking of the  _ trajinera _ , lolled her head over to rest against his bare, tattooed shoulder. “No thank you,” she murmured.

Ben had the good grace not to look offended; instead, he just smiled. “It’s really not like that.”

“Oh, no?”

“No, it isn’t.” He had honeyed cadence of a radio personality on salvia. “I’d never do you like that.”

Five months later, when they kissed in the back room of some academic wine-and-cheese shindig, it was Aroha who initiated the touching of lips, the pre-kiss and then the kiss proper. She, as usual, had no escape, was consumed by her unceasing desire for kindling for the fire between her legs. She never told Mako this part of the story; she only ever said that things ended “well” between her and Ben Callahan. By the time she and Mako started dating, she had moved on to studying under Erin Whittington – an ornithologist of whom Mako already had superficial knowledge, being the child of a Victoria U faculty member – and resolved to go back to calling Ben “Dr. Callahan” when they passed each other in the hallways of the biology department, all polite smiles and unhushed voices. 

She had iguanas on her hips. Mako saw them first when they “hung out” the weekend after Valhalla, bowling frames at Bowlarama, when Aroha danced after making her second strike in a row and the jumping, twisting, gyrating motion of her body raised her camisole up over the waistband of her low-rise jeans and revealed ink lizards crawling in toward the center of her pelvis. 

“What are those?” Mako asked, pulling off of the plastic lip of his cup of cheap bowling alley beer. 

“What?” Aroha followed the line of his gaze to her hips. “These?” She sauntered over to stand between his legs the way she’d stood between her father’s nine years before, pulling teeth. “ _ Iguana delicatissima _ . The Lesser Antillean iguana.” As she said this, she unbuttoned her jeans and pulled them halfway down over her hips, careless of the public setting and the pimple-faced teenagers bowling a couple of lanes over. 

Mako put his hands over hers, going, “Holy shit, you’re crazy.”

Her pants hanging open, Aroha leaned into his face and purred, “Please. You’re enchanted with me.” He was. He welcomed her hand on his right arm, her fingers tracing over the thin and thick black bands inked into his skin, her smirk the size of all outdoors. “I showed you mine. Show me yours.”

Mako took her to the grime-encrusted men’s restroom and pulled his shirt off to show her the Maori sun shining between his shoulderblades, the shark on the inside of his right forearm, the star of David stenciled into his right shoulder, the Japanese seascape coming to fruition over his left arm. When their kissing turned volcanically intense – her up against the inside wall of the restroom’s third stall, pulling at his hair, reaching down between his legs – Mako turned his head sideways and whispered, “No.”

“No?”

“I don’t want to do this on our first date.”

Aroha’s mouth crescented downward into a frown, but she let him put his shirt back on and rebuttoned her jeans in turn. They saw and spoke to each other nearly every day for the next week – energized by Mako’s lack of a real, adult schedule and Aroha’s corresponding lack of qualms with blowing off work and friendship to do whatever the fuck she wanted (i.e., Mako) – and when on the fourth Sunday in June Aroha told him to come over to her flat in Kilbirnie – “I’ll make you ratatouille,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind vegetables.” – Mako felt the first significant shift taking place between them, happening through and alongside the stories of her father and her childhood in Oamaru.

“Tell me a story.” Aroha had a devilish sort of smirk that Mako had become well-acquainted with over their many coffee, movie, and dinner dates prior – a smirk that made him dangerously amenable to just about anything she asked of him. She folded her legs beneath her on the sofa cushion they shared, adjusted her half-eaten plate of ratatouille over her lap, and shifted just a tad closer to him. “I feel like all I do is talk about myself when we’re together, and I don’t mind, I really don’t, but I want to hear something about you. Something crazy, something fucked up.”

“Something fucked up?” Mako asked.

“The  _ most _ fucked up.”

“Yikes, okay.” Mako dragged his fork across his plate, picking up the stray, difficult bits of tomato, zucchini, and eggplant to shovel into his mouth, and delved into his long-term memory for something to please and, perhaps, if he was lucky, shock his new girlfriend. There were so many of the good and boring instances of emotional abuse dealt by Mum, who he hadn’t seen for weeks at that time. There was the always tragic subject of Ezra, half-closeted homosexual extraordinaire and the perfect specimen of emotionally unavailable fatherhood. There were tender bits of the meat of his and Jem’s relationship that would have been wrong to share a mere week into a relationship, as deep as the river ran between Mako and his best friend of then six years. There was Robbie, and –  _ ding, ding, ding! _ The single most wrong thing that had ever happened to Mako, neatly stored away in the back of his mind so that he wouldn’t go stumbling over it on his regular romps through the attic, reliving his trauma, unable to have any trusting relationship with anyone, ever. 

“Shit,” he said, wiping his mouth against the back of his hand and then smiling – touched to the core, damn near ready to get married – when Aroha raised her napkin to his lips to do the job better, more properly. “Are you ready? It’s really bad.”

“Oh, yes, yes, yes!” Aroha bopped from side to side, nearly knocking her plate over in her anticipation. “The worse the better.”

“You won’t think I’m some kind of monstrous fuck-up? That I’m damaged goods?”

Aroha, for the first time Mako had ever seen since their initial meeting, let her face go intense with wide-eyed solemnity. “Do you think that  _ I’m  _ damaged goods? Do you think that  _ I’m  _ a fuck-up?”

Mako didn’t. He couldn’t imagine having a greater amount of admiration; wonder; or sudden, heart-attack love for anyone than he had for Aroha. He shook his head.

Aroha’s smirk returned. “Then I’ll afford you the same respect.” It was like her to talk like this, as if she was a well-mannered, well-educated character in some book from the previous century. “Tell me.”

“My older sibling used to get in my bed and masturbate on me when I was a kid.” Mako looked away from Aroha’s naked face, then – half-afraid it might incite him to do something like kiss her or bare his soul further or some other crazy thing like that. He was willingly brought back to the midnight thrusting, the rock of hips against his behind made bare and the warm, golden glow of the nightlight far off in the corner of the room. He remembered wanting to dissolve into that light, to say something though the muscles of his throat remained strangely paralyzed and his mind refused to produce anything but useless thoughts shaped like question marks, whys and how dares. Back with Aroha, Mako reached across to the pretty glass coffee table and retrieved his beer, took one long, grimacing sip from it and smoothed his fingers over the denim texture of his pants leg until he felt comfortable enough to equivocate freely.

“They, uh… they’ve always had, like, problems? With their sexuality? Not saying that’s behind what they did, but I thought it was worth mentioning. I don’t think they know that I know. We’ve never had a conversation about it, and I basically just used to play dead when it happened, you know. I’d go really still and quiet. Breathe hard like I was still sleeping. I’ve heard that people do that when they get raped. I don’t even know if I can call it rape. I don’t know. I’ve never talked about this before. I think I’m saying too much, it’s weird, it’s–” Finally, Mako cut himself off and looked at his dinner companion, who was frowning at him with a granite, dimpled gravitas that was almost overwhelming. He reached for a joke: raised his hands flippantly in the air and said, “And we’re still friends to this day!”

The frown only deepened. “Jesus Christ.” There was a moment when Aroha had looked ready to go all warm and tender on him (both dresses Mako hadn’t yet seen on her up until that point) but she’d changed courses at the last minute and detoured to gently curious, asked him, “How can you even speak with them anymore?”

Again, Mako had internally debated the merits of total honesty. Again, he’d found Aroha’s lack of eyeliner and her slightly chapped lips insanely disarming. Again, he’d dove into his Heineken – for guidance, for strength, he wasn’t completely sure – and surfaced ready to say something, anything, that even vaguely smacked of truth.

“They’re not a bad person.” Even saying this, Mako struggled with the notion and its veracity; he’d wondered what kind of person Robbie was for a long time, just as he’d wondered what kind of person his mother, his father, and he himself was. “They were just a kid, too. Plus, if I cut out of my life every person who did some irreparably shitty, totally damaging thing to me or vice versa, I’d have no one, ever. Literally no one.” He looked at Aroha with a sad smile that had already begun to wilt before it even fully flowered into being. “Is that sad, or what?”

If Aroha had been any kind of hypocritically normal, or if she’d possessed an ounce of conventional, well-justified fear within her, she’d have run away from him in the face of such a confession. If she’d had any sense of self-preservation, she’d have seen him and all of his baggage as the biggest red flags on the face of the fucking globe and turned tail immediately, would have forgotten his number and, whenever they’d have inevitably run into each other at the grocery store or some other Wellington music bar a minimum of two weeks later, feigned busyness or family strife before disappearing out of his life forever to join the ranks of the women who’d ever been deeply significant flashes in the pan of his existence. 

But of course, while unquestionably intelligent, Aroha was as led by her heart as Mako was. That was more than likely the reason why when looking upon her for the first time and so many of the times afterward, all Mako had seen was himself, only hotter, softer, and wider in the hips and mouth and maybe even parts of Aroha then invisible and undetectable to him, parts that laid silent and not quite locked up within her, waiting for him to fashion a key, a pick, or a bobby pin.

So, answering his question, Aroha had kissed him. She’d touched her tongue to the roof of his beery mouth. When she crawled into his lap and Mako put his hands on the bits of her he’d most been wanting to touch – her supple breasts unbound by a bra and the fullness of her apple bottom – instead of fleeing in the opposite direction like any girl in a horror movie would have, she’d let him put his mouth on her neck and suck until dark purple roses bloomed there.

“You’re so beautiful,” he murmured into her skin, painfully, generically romantic. His head turned into hers a little; he elusively muttered, “You smell amazing, you know.”

This, she liked. This, she swallowed up in her own mouth. So as to not disturb her flatmate, she led him then to her bedroom, where she took all of her clothes off and then all of his. Minutes upon minutes later, they laid with their legs woven in and out of her comforter and Mako traced his fingers over the hairy inside of her armpit until she laughed, tickled.

“Stay the night?” she asked.

He buried his face in the soft thicket of her head hair. “Gladly.”

Things didn’t progress immediately from that point onwards with the sort of cinematic melodrama one might have expected. In spite of the intentions of God, the Universe, and Mako and Aroha themselves, their relationship never truly descended into the sadomasochistic pits of screaming matches, breaking-and-enterings, and long nights spent trawling through the depths of each other’s MySpaces to dig up jealousy fuel and release anguished midnight curses into pillowcases and bedsheets. Instead, Mako visited Aroha at her hotel bar workplace once a week with a hamburger from Ekim, and when she’d look at him like he was a knight in not-so-shining armor and drag him in by the collar to lay a fat one on him, he’d forget, little by little, and perhaps only momentarily, that being in love all but necessarily entailed extreme pain and sacrifice, that it wasn’t just French fries and tongue kisses and sloppy dry-humping in hotel bathrooms fancier than just about every flat he’d ever lived in in his life.

“I wanna go down on you,” he’d breathe into Aroha’s mouth with her pressed uncomfortably back against a porcelain sink, his hands already up her nondescript little bartender’s skirt and clawing at her black stockings, her one pair that wasn’t full of runs. 

“No, you can’t,” she’d almost invariably reply, laughing, because for as wild as she could be, especially in the sexual arena, she’s always been super edgy about legitimate sex acts at her workplace.

If she got her way, Mako would bend her over the edge of the sink and they’d grind on each other through their clothes like a couple of horny teenagers. If he got his way, Aroha would push her stockings and panties down around her bootied ankles, hike her skirt up around her hips, and let him bury his face between her thighs. Either way, they’d bite deep red marks into the skin around their lips and mop sweat and other bodily fluids up with damp brown paper towels before emerging from the bathroom five minutes apart from each other, looking slightly unkempt and absolutely radiant in the way only short starbursts of sexual frenzy can make a person.

Sometimes, she’d serve him half-price gin and tonics and let him listen to her and Corrine Day’s femininely oriented, work appropriate conversations about the hotness of James Spader and reproductive health legislation and methods of eyeliner application, including this one procedure with a spoon Aroha has to demonstrate for Mako before he can truly understand and admire the certain genius of it. 

Sometimes, if her supervisor wasn’t present, she’d sit in front of the bar with him and he’d watch her eat her hamburger like a guy (there wasn’t a ladylike bone in her body, he found), and with one tired leg kicked up across his long lap, she’d share French fries with him  _ Lady and the Tramp _ -style – one salty end in her mouth and the other in his – until Corrine made a show of rolling disgusted eyes toward the ceiling and started bitching at them to, “Get a room, please.”

Sometimes, after an hour of patiently watching and waiting for her shift to end, he’d drive her back to his flat on Hargreaves and watch her take all of her uncomfortable, semi-formal work clothes off – the little black apron, the starched white button-down, the hip-hugging pencil skirt, the dark, sheer nylons – and between leaving them in a heap on the floor and getting in the bath he’d run for her, she’d carefully undress him too, lie down in the middle of his bed, and giggle, giggle, giggle while they ran hands and mouths all over each other – tickling his cheek with her eyelashes, ghosting his breath over the insides of her thighs, dragging her fingertips up each knob of his spine, pressing his mouth into the pulse at her wrist. 

For months, it was nothing but fun, really, nothing but bright, delicious pocketfuls of reasons to slog through their shitty, pointless young adult existences; make unnecessary small talk with strangers; eat at least marginally balanced meals thrice a day; and get up in the mornings after meager five-hour sleep shifts. It was waking up and having the first thing they saw each day be each other at least four days out of every week; the gaps in each other’s schedules shaped startlingly like each other; on the weekends never leaving Aroha’s bed; occupying every free minute with sex, sleep, and food. It was the roiling Alka-Seltzer feeling Mako would get in the pit of his stomach when Aroha wore her hair in loose, awful, messy curls that cascaded down her shoulders and around her neck or sat close enough to him to touch, the same feeling she’d get when he’d sleep with his head on her chest or take the first few drags of a cigarette that he’d shortly pass over to her. It was the slow accumulation of inside jokes and silly, sartorial things like Aroha napping in Mako’s boxers and Mako wearing her eleventh grade charm necklace to work, going to the ballet and weeping loudly enough to disturb their fellow audience members, snorting coke in piss-soaked stairwells adjacent to bars and giggling at the sweet burn in the back of the throat, fucking in a tangle of long hair and long limbs. It was snorting while laughing, it was late night fast food joyriding, it was dancing at jazz fusion shows, it was walking back home afterward.

When it came time for Aroha to formally meet the family (i.e., Jem), Mako chose the most neutral ground he could possibly find in Wellington: Havana on Wigan, one of their old university haunts, where Jem in all of his social anxiety would feel comfortable – empowered, even – in the face of the slow, blatant betrayal of the six years of built-up intimacy and half-romantic devotion between himself and Mako. 

“She’s always running late,” Mako confided in Jem as they sat awaiting Aroha’s arrival at the bar, already having ordered Kawakawa Sour Sours and turned in toward each other so that when Mako allowed his long legs to swing freely, they touched Jem’s. He moved to sip a little nervously at his cocktail. “I swear to God, I don’t know where her brain is sometimes.”

“Oh, then she’s perfect for you,” Jem replied without heat, reaching over to poke Mako in the center of his forehead. Mako swatted the offending hand away and was rewarded with a second poke, this time in his left shoulder.

“I hope you like her.” Mako realized he half-whispered this, and so became apparent the sheer magnitude of his apprehension that the night wouldn’t go well. With Jem, he shared a probing look. “What are we going to do if you don’t like her?”

Jem scoffed. “You’re asking me that like I’m the most bitter, hard-to-please person on the face of the Earth. I  _ like people _ , Mako.”

“Oh, please. We judge people for kicks, and you’re better at it than I am.”

“Since when?!”

“Since, since, since last semester when you called Dr. Elliston a ‘ _ melting hippo with halitosis _ ’ because he dropped your GPA one point two weeks before graduation.”

Jem released a hard, snorting noise drug up from the back of his throat. “That was justified, not to mention hilarious.”

“I know. I’m still having like, PTSD flashbacks to it. In the middle of the night I’ll think of it and then I can’t stop laughing for twenty fucking minutes.”

“So those are the noises I hear coming from your room,” Jem said, intentionally ambiguous, then trailed off into a silly smile, tasting his drink and contorting his face immediately in gustatory astonishment. “Bloody hell, what did you order for me? Mmm.” He took more of the cocktail into his mouth. “This is something.”

Mako watched Jem in that moment, his lips pursed around the rim of his coupe glass, glasses inching down his nose, the nosepads all loose from years of wear. He was taken by quiet, entirely boring love for the other, by fear of moving past that very instant, where they sat speechlessly together and adored each other without having to prove anything. Stones sank only half-comfortably in his stomach.

“Seriously, though,” Jem said once he’d finished making ridiculous expressions at his drink, had moved on to looking at Mako with a calm, even look on his face, his elbow propped against the bar. “All I care about is you getting loved in exactly the way you want to be loved.”

“Oh my God,” Mako whined, unable to take the sincerity, the unadulterated emotional maturity of the moment.

“If she fulfills literally the one criterion, she’s aces in my book.” Jem affected a deep bow. “Now, that’s the only serious thing I’m going to say for the rest of the night and you can pull your head out of the sand, you sod.”

On this insanely appropriate note, Aroha came flouncing through Havana’s front door in Mako’s favorite striped sweater and a pair of stockings that ran heavily up the side. Immediately finding Mako with her eyes, she made a swift beeline for his side and, reaching him, pressed their bodies and their mouths together, humming enthusiastically into the heat of the kiss.

“Good evening, my darling man,” she cooed, briefly touching her nose to Mako’s. She turned to Jem not a second later and gave him her dazzling thousand-watt grin, leaned over to drop a not entirely unwelcome kiss on the apple of his right cheek as well. “And good evening to you as well, Jeremiah. So sorry about last week.”

Jem simply nodded in acknowledgment of the incident, in which he’d woken up Tuesday of the previous week to find Aroha half-naked in his kitchen, eating the last of his expensive French-style yogurt out of the refrigerator. “Don’t mention it – it’s fine.”

That night, Aroha told the truncated tale of Ben Callahan and the walking fish of Xochimilco, and the congregation switched from Kawakawa Sour Sours to two rounds of Good Vibrations. Sitting on Mako’s lap, motormouthing with a cocaine glint in her eyes, Aroha fed to Jem as she’d previously fed in separate pieces to Mako the somewhat exaggerated, intermittently magical, cherry-picked version of her life, heedless of the ugly glances being passed her way by fellow patrons bothered by the particular loudness of her voice and the occasional vulgarity of her speech’s content. When the overly adult, low-key ambiance of Havana grew oppressive, they walked a block and a half down to Golding’s Free Dive, where they drank more for cheaper; ate marginally disgusting onion rings; reveled in the dark, fluorescent filthiness of the joint; and raised their voices high over Nick Gilder and The Marshall Tucker Band blasting from the overhead speakers. Two hours into the night, when Mako and Aroha could both call themselves sufficiently drunk – having that deeply stupid competition over who loved who first and the most, “I loved you first, don’t lie,” and “No, you didn’t; you didn’t want to have sex with me until a week in,” and “That’s not love! That’s propriety!” and “Fuck propriety! Propriety doesn’t exist when it comes to true love!” – and Jem, the one sane and relatively sober man, had let the tension perceptible only to Mako bleed out of the line of his shoulders, Aroha leaned over the bar, pointed up at the chalkboard hanging on the wall behind and above it, and asked the bartender, “What’s a hole-in-one, bro?”

The bartender – a Maori woman with  _ tā moko  _ on her lips and chin – stopped drying a highball glass with a red dishtowel just long enough to look at Aroha and reply, “Shot of Jägermeister, glass of champagne, and a piercing wherever you want. We have a professional piercing artist in the back.”

Aroha’s face filled immediately with light. “ _ Fuck _ yeah!” Her hand shot out to grasp Mako’s, to pull it high up into the air. “Do it with me, babe. I’ve been wanting to get my navel pierced for months.”

“Yeah?” Mako let his fingers interlace with Aroha’s. “And what’ll I pierce, huh?”

Aroha flicked her tongue at him.

Mako’s expression shifted just into the unimpressed. “No.”

“Oh,  _ yes _ , Mako,” Jem interjected from Aroha’s other side, putting his Yeastie Boys down on the bar and leaning over to catch Mako’s eye. “Please, pierce your tongue. I’m begging you. It would be so becoming.”

“I’ll pierce my tongue when you pierce your dick, mate.” Mako turned to the bartender. “You said wherever you want, right?”

The bartender nodded. Jem showed Mako the backs of his index and middle fingers.

“Ooh!” Aroha, thinking nothing of it, began to unbutton Mako’s shirt, reaching in to fondle his chest. “Get your nip pierced. That should be  _ oodles _ of fun.”

“Yeah, especially when it gets infected and you’re oozing pus out of your chest,” Jem put in.

“Holy shitcicles, I hate both of you so much,” Mako announced with nothing but love in his voice. He turned to the bartender a second time. “How about two holes-in-one, eh? Over here.”

Which is how Mako and Aroha ended the night lying in Mako’s bed, both of them drunk and struggling not to fiddle with the barbells pushed through their sensitive skin.

“I can’t wait to play with yours,” Aroha said. When she reached over to touch, Mako grabbed her wrist and shoved it clumsily, gigglingly down into the meager space between their bodies. In reply, she moved to lay her head down against the unaffected side of his chest and placed her hand on his hip, rubbing inwards toward the inside of his thigh, not quite sexy and very, very sweet. Jem laid on the other side of the wall to their left, shifting and tucking himself in bed in the wake of his post-bar shower. His face floated in Mako’s head then – soft and halfway ajar that night, the smile that he’d worn, his eyes when he’d looked at Aroha, friendly and not trying to conceal anything.

“I think he liked you,” Mako murmured into Aroha’s hair. He wasn’t afraid that Jem would hear – the walls were thin, sure, but they had nothing to hide from each other – he just felt quiet, subdued, a sort of heavy-souled inebriation that hushed his voice and made his physical body feel smaller than it should have.

Instead of rejoicing, Aroha tipped her chin upward and asked, “You think? You don’t know?”

Mako ran his knuckles up her stomach, swerving carefully around her navel. “Jem’s really private.”

“Still.” Aroha put her fingers between his thighs and let their hairy, leanly muscled weight sandwich each digit. “You’re his best friend. You don’t know what he’s thinking?”

This question so alarmed Mako, in his then wholly romantic state of mind, that his breath caught in his throat and the triangular shadows stretching up the wood-paneled ceiling became predatory, ominous in their darkness. His hand stilled at the bottom of Aroha’s ribcage. 

“I know  _ him _ ,” he said, closing his eyes. “I can’t read his mind, though. That’s a little too much to ask for.”

“I disagree,” came Aroha’s breathy, husky response. She turned her head to kiss his sternum, damp press of lips to his toasted brown skin. “If you love someone, you should know everything about them. Every thought, every desire, every memory.” 

In the spirit of this principle – this desire for interpersonal omniscience, for deep and flawless knowing – they decided the next day to call in sick to work, rented a Kia Optima from the previous year, plugged UB40 into the tape deck, and drove six hours to a beach rental in Kaikoura, carrying with them nothing but their internal baggage, their toothbrushes, and enough clothes to last them through the weekend. Ironically, considering her propensity to luxury, Aroha had never possessed expensive tastes. She’d have taken a Big Mac over a filet mignon any day of the week if she’d been given the choice. Even so, Mako had felt compelled, when they’d made their necessary trip to the local grocery store soon after touching down near the shore, to buy his girl a lobster and cook it for her himself.

“But it’s alive!” Aroha had stared at him – thrillingly naked-faced, abjectly horrified – as he cradled with near-comic affection the brown paper bag in which their lobsters had been carefully placed. Her expression grew even more outraged, if possible, when he pulled out one of the crimson crustaceans – this one, he’d decided to name “Ruby” – to ogle and observe, grinning like some impish child at its wriggling front legs. 

“You can’t cook them if they’re already dead,” he pointed out. “They come out mushy and gross if you–”

“I  _ know _ that, I’m not an idiot.” Aroha’s eyes went narrow with suspicion when Mako set the bag down to handle Ruby with both hands and fly her around in the air like an armored, antennaed fighter jet. She watched him hover the lobster teasingly over her head, glared hard at him as she said, “It takes three minutes for them to die when you boil them, though. People say that they can feel pain when they’re, you know, getting boiled alive.”

“Did you go vegan while I wasn’t looking or something?” Mako flirted with the idea of putting Ruby on Aroha’s head and watching her, both of them, go fucking apeshit in the middle of the miniature fish market in which they stood, but he’d recently begun trying lovingkindness on for size, so instead, he took Aroha’s hands and placed Ruby very gently in them, closed his own palms around them. “Cows hurt when you kill them for food. Ducks hurt when you kill them for food. Have you ever had foie gras? Do you have any  _ idea _ how that shit is–”

“ _ I know _ , I know.” Aroha had looked up at him – she always needed to, him being as tall as he was and she being as short as she was. “I just – I read an article last night. I feel bad.”

He smiled at her, wry and knowing. “They’re made to make you feel bad.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

They bought the lobsters anyway. Aroha talked to them all the way back to the rental, named Ruby’s sister “Garnet”. When they started screaming as soon as Mako dropped them into the big pot of boiling water on their rented stainless steel stove, Aroha bolted directly out of the kitchen, out of the living room, all the way down to the beach while yelling every permutation of “fuck” Mako had ever heard before (and even some he hadn’t), and it took three Google searches and a handful of answers on Ask.com to convince her that the creatures hadn’t actually shrieked in pain – that it had just been air rushing out of their dark red exoskeletons – and get her to come back inside the house, but Mako laughed about that all night long, laughed long after it stopped being reasonable to do so.

“It wasn’t that funny,” Aroha said, bitchy, around the crack of ten, pulling her camisole off and throwing it in Mako’s face in a distinctly vengeful fashion. “I really thought they were hurting.”

“I know, baby.” Mako dove in to lick and chuckle into her mouth, hands coming up to snap her bra undone. “I know.”

They were extra gentle together that night.

Over the course of that February weekend, Mako rubbed his fingertips through the hair just above Aroha’s left ear, growing out fuzzy from where it had been shaved so close to her head the night he’d met her months before, and Aroha just _hmm_ ed at him, wearing a calm sort of happiness that he’d nearly never seen on her. She painted both of their nails shades of wine and sparkly black, traded the mushrooms from his pizza slices with the anchovies on hers. They watched no TV, but listened to music almost constantly – so constantly that early-discography John Legend and Sade nearly became the temporary third and fourth members of their relationship – and while they did talk some about Taika Ihimaera and Rui Ngata, about their respective relationships with Marj and with Jem, about Mako’s past adventures with the sheep and goats of Raukokore and Aroha’s old schoolgirl scrappiness (all the faded scars on her legs had been an anthology of her former delinquency, and Mako had taken much pleasure in reading them with his mouth) – mostly, they just learned how to exist together. Cooked together. Washed dishes together. Read books together. Took baths together.

“Did you ever have a favorite place growing up?” 

Mako’s hands were skimming over Aroha’s naked, somewhat thunderous thighs in a pool of nearly scalding bathwater when she asked him this; the aptness and the timeliness of it all pulled his lips back tight over and around his teeth. “No,” he’d said.

Aroha’s head turned back and around with incredulous speed and force at that, her wet hair whipping lightly against his right cheek and her gawking face a mask of amused skepticism. “‘ _ No _ ’?” she echoed.

“I’m not good at  _ liking _ things. I never have been.” Mako’s hands, habitually hyperactive, always itching for something to do, hooked themselves under Aroha’s thighs and pulled them not quite bossily, just this shy of coaxing up against her stomach so that he could slip and slide an aquamarine loofah down her shins, him smirking when she rolled her eyes at his all too masculine obstinacy.

“So, what?” Aroha let her head fall back against the coathanger stretch of his shoulder, her mouth and nose so close to his neck that he felt the warm puffs of her words against his damp skin. “You’ve never had–” He’d put the loofah down to pinch at her leg hair, then, so she’d broken off into a snickering laugh, into, “Quit, oh my God.” When he stopped, when he moved on to simply smoothing his fingers over the prickly patches with a tenderness even he hadn’t fully understood at the time, she felt free to finish her thought: “You’ve never had any preferences of any kind?”

A long-term aspiring amnesiac, Mako had long been used to thinking about the past in terms of missing and yearning, but never liking – never conventional, allistic enjoyment. He had to translate his own language of perpetual discomfort and incongruity into something Aroha’s epicurean everything could understand, even if just barely.

“It’s weird, Aroha. I don’t know if you can tell, but I’m practically incapable of ever being actually, like, okay? Or comfortable? And I’ve always been like, too afraid of losing things to settle into enjoying them, really. If I  _ did _ like something – growing up, you know – I’d get crazily, kind of unpleasantly sucked into it, and that wasn’t a fun feeling. That wasn’t  _ liking _ things. That was being attached to them, that was neurosis, that was… fixation. Obsession.” At Aroha’s hybrid look of pity and blasé disapproval, he shook his head so obnoxiously against hers and whined, “I  _ know _ , I’m so pathetic and sad. My life is just one gigantic alternative rock song–”

“I’m dating the world’s greatest sad boy.” Aroha grinned up at the ceiling, something resigned and so pure in the unadulterated love and delight it conveyed. “For Christmas, I’m getting you a grand piano and a hardback volume of Edgar Allan Poe, a razorblade so you can slit your wrists–”

Then she exploded into her snorting, crazy dolphin laughter – Mako having turned to gnash his teeth against the side of her face and shoved his fingers up into the ticklish places beneath her knees – and then their limbs thrashed and bruised against the tile – too much and too long to be sharing the bathtub’s relatively meager space – and then the water had gone everywhere – splashing over the side of the tub and onto the floor and into their faces and even their mouths – and then Mako had felt it. Felt It. Felt natal realness, the insane possibility that spiraled out from and between them, bringing him back to his shitty diapers and his mum and his lullabies, shrunk him insanely and made him feel so viscerally unalone. 

Standing on the bathroom rug and scuffing a towel over Aroha’s damp hair, he looked down into her full face and said, “There was this place on the beach.”

He and Abel Hipango – the one kid in his Raukokore class who got around in a wheelchair, having been born breech, strangled bad by his own umbilical – used to wander down there every week the summer before they turned sixteen. They smoked cannabis bought from the Short twins and drank vodka from clear water bottles. Mako dipped his toes into the person he had been and would be so slowly and so rapidly becoming – in Raukokore, in Wellington, in New Orleans, with his grandmother, with Jem, with the theatre kids who called themselves the Teasippers, with the meth addict from Australia with the beautiful blond hair, in the bedroom, in the shower, on Hargreaves, on Louisa, drinking Speight’s, bathed in yellow light,  _ a bout de soufflé _ , in a car, along the interstate, soaking in a tub with a woman he’d thrown himself into out of a sense of loneliness alone – and there, he’d accidentally, explicitly felt himself becoming something, for better or for worse. 

“I never really liked it, but I felt something there.”

Aroha smiled at him. “And Lord knows you never experience any sort of human emotion.”

He smiled back. “Of course I don’t.”

And then, because he felt something again, he kissed her. She knew everything about him in that moment, and he believed he knew her. Out of the bath, with their arms around each other and their naked bodies pressed together, Aroha told him that he fit perfectly against all of her curves and the inner arc of her arms – no inconvenient spaces between them – and that the Universe must have made them for each other.

Mako believed her. Sometimes loving someone is just that: believing.   
  
  



	12. 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ;~)  
> ya'll FINALLY get secks in this chapter

#  _ 12 _

“KC, my lovely wench.”

“Godfrey, my darling swain.”

“I’ve been contemplating Disney movies.”

“As any mature adult who works three hours a day should.”

“Have you ever noticed how almost all of the Disney films with royalty as the main characters never really have any sort of focus on commoners?”

“Well, why the hell would they? Like you said, the main characters are royal.”

“I know, but like. Hear me out, babe. Back in the days when royalty existed–”

“Royalty still exists. Have you heard of the Queen of England? The Queen of Denmark? The Queen of–”

“Okay,  _ yes _ , genius, I misspoke. Let me rephrase.  _ When _ royalty exists–”

“That will look exceptional on the court transcripts of this broadcast.”

“Court transcripts?”

“For when I inevitably file for divorce after the nth fart joke you make while I’m trying to sleep.”

“Can I live? Can I actually, honestly live? When royalty exists, it’s ostensibly there to govern normal people, right? So why are there like, no normal people in Disney movies that aren’t directly serving the royal family or weird outcasts who are  _ speshul? _ Why isn’t there even an implication of the existence of normal people that require governance? That have jobs? That have families? Especially with  _ Beauty and the Beast _ , where the prince literally lives in the middle of the forest, miles and miles away from the settlement full of dumb, bigoted yokels. What the hell is he the prince of? The  _ trees?! _ Is it just, what, screw normies? Forget peasants? Is that what it is?”

“Yes, that  _ is _ what it is! Normal people don’t matter!”

“Wow. There you have it. That’s the theme of today’s broadcast, folks: normal people don’t matter. I’m feeling like a little Pink Floyd is in order. Or how about some Green Day? How are you feeling, Kace?”

“Pink Floyd sounds like a winner to me.”

As the opening auditory skulk of “Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2” begins to stream through the radio speakers, Mako keys the Jetta’s purring engine off and shoves its driver’s side door open – hard and thoughtless and close enough to the curb that he is immediately rewarded with an ugly scraping sound. 

“Shit!” he exclaims, and only by the grace of some unseen heavenly creature does he not lose his entire shit against the car horn. He decides he doesn’t want to see the damage, closes the door, and goes to unlock the gate, a sudden nimbuslike darkness encroaching upon his mood.

It is Monday, January 6 th . Last week, The Gehringer-Ngata-Tui clan celebrated the arrival of the new year with a trip to Oschner Baptist on Napoleon Avenue, where Rui Ngata received her first session of chemotherapy with her favorite baseball cap on her head and her mitten-clad hand reaching out for Kory’s – her softness with her grandchild always somewhat infuriating to Mako in light of her lifelong, bipolar viciousness where he’s been concerned. 

“Do you feel anything?” Kory had asked her beloved Nan, squeezing the woman’s fingers through the woolen cloth encasing them.

Mum’s face had taken on a familiar wry expression, an upward quirk of her eyebrow and her mouth’s right corner that was indicative of imminent sarcasm. “Yeah,” she’d said, then reached up to pinch Kory’s cheek. “ _ You _ , squashin’ the hell out of me.”

Kory and Jem had laughed. Mako, feeling emo as hell, had simply forced his mouth into an opaque, painful smile, then excused himself to get Mum a cup of water and proceeded to breathe hard in the hallway for the next five minutes, his phone vibrating in his pocket, the nurses in purple scrubs avoiding his eyes just as he avoided theirs, the fluorescent hospital lights beaming milky alien headaches into his skull. 

Today, he still has a headache. He walks into the house shivering from the Crescent City’s damp, quintessentially January cold. Mum is there – standing in the kitchen, doing something involving a knife – and as soon as she hears the sharp  _ click _ of the front door’s latch, she makes the incredibly irritating decision that her thoughts at that moment are best expressed at the very top of her lungs.

“Hello, Mako! How was traffic?! I bet it was light – you’re not usually home before 5:30! Listen, I know you’re tired, but the kitchen is looking pitiful, bro, absolutely pitiful! We need more cucumbers! We need deli items! Kory is running out of snack foods! She’s all out of those little muffins she likes – you know the ones I’m talking about, right?! The ones that come fourteen in a pack! I don’t know what you want to do for dinner, but there isn’t much to pick from so you might want to pick up some meat and stuff as well! What I’m getting at is you need to go grocery shopping! Preferably tonight! Are you listening to me?! You’re being quiet!”

Mako steps into the threshold between the kitchen and the dining area, leaning with one arm propped against the breakfast bar. “You don’t have to yell when I’m standing right here,” he says for possibly the seven-hundredth time in his life. “And I’m being quiet because you keep talking.”

“When is the last time I’m going to ask you not to speak to me like that?” Mum, slicing up what Mako assumes is the last cucumber at the counter next to the sink, throws a piercing look over her shoulder at him, eyes zeroing in on whatever the hell is going on with his head. “What’s that?” she asks.

“A bandana.” Mako pulls at the thick, wooly hair protruding from over the top of said bandana, which he has fashioned as a bright red, paisley headband. “It’s easier to drive without my hair in my face.”

“Signs point to you need a haircut.” Mum holds up a slice of cucumber in his direction, which she pops into her own mouth when he shakes his head at it. “Tell me about work.”

“Oh, what’s to tell?” Mako folds his arms atop the breakfast bar and  _ thunk _ s his head down against them, cranium pillowed against the slick sleeves of his leather jacket. “Everyone is crazy in their own completely mundane way. I pretend to be a writer. It’s all very fun.”

“You are a writer. I don’t know where this horrid self-deprecating streak of yours came from.”

“Gee, I wonder.”

Mum squints at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.” Mako moves away from the breakfast bar, into the kitchen, where he can give Mum a half-assed hug from behind – one arm coming up and around her plumpness, her apple-shaped core – and press a kiss to her temple. He turns his attention to the refrigerator. “Kory’s sleeping?”

“She went straight upstairs when she got home,” comes Mum’s reply. “She’s been up there since. I don’t know what she’s up to, but you know she likes to nap.”

Opening the fridge, Mako peers inside, looking for his afternoon juice fix. The bottle of probiotic peach-mango is four-fifths gone; he decides to kill it without the use of a glass. “And Jem?” he asks.

“He’s upstairs as well. Said he wanted to call your friend. Kirby, I think his name is?”

“Quick.”

“Whatever.” Mum moves to retrieve a bowl from one of the overhead cabinets, the salt and pepper shakers from the countertop. “Are you going to go to the grocery store?” 

The question overwhelms Mako with globalized exhaustion, tiredness enough to descend into and then bleed completely through the hardwood, the house’s foundation, and deep into the earth, into a place that’s quiet and dark and impossible to breathe in. He swallows down the remainder of the household juice and, knowing that his answer needs to be yes, looks at Mum and says, “Not tonight.”

Mum looks back at him with big, kind of outraged eyes. “Not tonight?!”

“I feel like I’m going to die.”

“What’s fucking new?” Mum turns her back on him, and he feels free to bug his eyes out and warp his face with sudden, horrific rage, to fling his middle finger into the air and silently yell at her shoulder blades. Ignorantly, she seasons her cucumber slices and continues to bitch. “You’re depressed every single fucking day of your life, Mako. I don’t see how that means you can’t fulfill the most basic requirements of your adult existence. A dumb and blind retard can do it, and yet you can’t? You’re not the only person who lives here, you know? If you were, you could fuck off and be sad all you wanted, but you have a family. We have needs. I’ve never neglected  _ your _ needs just because I wasn’t in the mood.”

Mako recalls with almost comic immediacy the week when he was thirteen and his mother, in one of her regular instances of manic rage, iced him out just as much as she was able to without the practice being considered outright parental neglect. No speech passed between them, only the most fleeting of looks where exchanged, all dinner duties were relegated to Nana Victoria for the week, and a psychic coldness permeated the house, sinking deep into all of Mako’s pores and orifices. He recalls the particularly lonely way the wind whistled through the trees that week, the scratch of branches against his bedroom window when he tried and failed to sleep for six out of those seven nights. He recalls relief that lasted for all of a day followed by the intense animal yearning of any child rejected by their mother, an internal vortex that felt large and vicious enough to swallow him whole. He chucks the empty juice bottle in the rubbish bin.

“I’m not arguing with you about this,” he says on an exhale. He starts to walk out of the room with a markedly leaden weight to his steps, his heavy tread affected just to tap into Mum’s nonexistent sense of basic empathy for her kin. “I’m too tired.”

“Yes, of course,” Mum is quick to counter. “Run away from the perfectly easy adult conversation.”

“It’s not a conversation if you’re the only one talking,” Mako notes, trying hard not to be smart and not really succeeding.

“That’s because  _ you shut down _ , you selfish piece of shit!” Just like that, Mum is no longer simply argumentative but is actually infuriated with him, her no-good, difficult, unruly little boy. She puts the cutting board in the sink, and its loud, echoing  _ clank _ tells Mako that she’s slammed it down against the metal instead of just dropping it in like a normal, happy person. He flinches with his entire body.

“Goddammit, Mako, why do you always do this?! I try to have some kind of mature fucking exchange with you and you just fucking turn to stone! The only thing is, I can’t break up with you! As easy as my life would be without you and all your stubborn kiddy bullshit in it, I’ll never be rid of you–”

“I’m sorry, Mum.”

“What?!” Mum jerks her head to the side, stalking across the kitchen in his direction, and try as he might to stand his ground, Mako cannot help but back away from her, into the bottleneck entryway of the room where he is sandwiched between the wall and the breakfast bar. Her nostrils flare, bovine. “I can’t hear you when you’re fucking  _ mumbling _ –”

“I said I’m sorry, alright?” Mako throws his hands into the air and, for the sake of his composure, does not look his mother straight in the face. “Could you just, not yell at me for like, two minutes? Just, please – lower your voice so I don’t fucking die through sheer force of will or something.” He takes a breath. Mum unspeaking, he continues. “I’m sorry I’m your son and you’re stuck with me and I’m like, the worst ever. I’m really, really sorry. I’ll go to the grocery store tonight and get you cucumbers and muffins and everything you need.” His palms come piously together in front of his chest. “You deserve it.” Then he turns around and practically runs out of the room, up the stairs and into the master bedroom without another word.

Running away, like always.

A dog chasing its tired, drooping tail.

Jem looks up with his phone pressed to his ear, laughing. “Hey, Mako just came in the room. Quick says hi!”

Mako just waves his hand to indicate his acknowledgement, then slips into the bathroom, heavy in all his winter clothes. 

He takes his time undressing: peeling the leather jacket off of his sleeves and over his shoulders, shucking off his skinnies, his boots, his thick and soft wool socks. Darting out of the room briefly to close the bedroom door, he returns to the bathroom and rids himself of the rest of his clothes – stupid colorblocked sweater, Lou Reed  _ Transformer _ T-shirt, his underwear dotted with cutesy peppermint swirls, the lattermost a Christmas present from Kory. He runs hot, clear water into the bathtub and finds mood-appropriate music on his phone – the half-deafening, angelically complex noise of Broken Social Scene, his so-called “weird tunes”; the feminine despondency of Regina Spektor, soothing and sedating him in tandem. He’s been luxuriating in a pool of too-hot water – quiet, heartsore, half-asleep after a straight week of nightmares and afterhours anxiety – for fifteen going on twenty minutes when KC calls him and invites him to dinner.

“Hey!” For some reason KC is yelling when he answers the phone – Mako can’t quite tell if it’s plain enthusiasm, a particularly loud environment, or a case of partial deafness he just happened not to have picked up on in his eight years knowing the woman. “We’re back on the air in like three minutes, but I wanted to call you! Come have dinner with us tonight!”

“Tonight?” Mako sits up as straight as he can in the bathtub, trying to keep his phone as far away as physically possible from the surface of the water. His mind is addled by the warm bath and the argument with Mum, his thoughts all twisted around each other like vines climbing up a thin, diseased tree. “What time?”

“Godfrey and I get off in an hour, so sevenish? 7:30?” There is an abrupt jangling noise, then KC is exclaiming, “ _ Shit! _ All over the floor. Anyway. Come? Please? We miss you, and June just got back from the big bad Midwest.”

“Wow, okay,” he says on an exhale before he can think to rein it in. Jem walks into the room; Mako tries to avoid looking straight at him, anticipating the instant telepathic exchange that will occur if he does, and summarily fails, drawn always like a heliotrope plant to Jem’s shining sun. “That’s… it’s about time. That’s awesome.”

“Does that mean you’ll come?” KC asks. “We can pick you up! We’re in the Quarter so we’re just like five minutes away from you.”

Mako considers this offer, and his frankly shit mood, and his grocery-related obligations, and how so very hard KC is trying to get him to accept. Instinctively, his eyes flit across the room, past the toilet and past Jem, and fix themselves upon the medicine cabinet above the sink, Superman-sightseeing the plastic bottle of blue-green capsules sitting within it through the mirrored glass door. He says, “Um.”

“Oh, come on. Bayou Hot Wings, baby. I’ll buy you a drink.”

The little pill bottle begins to dance. Jem sits on the toilet, watching him and waiting. Mako’s stomach clenches with twisted desire. Alcohol? Antianxiety meds? Does a more perfectly dangerous cocktail exist?

“Okay, I’ll come.” he says. “But I’m driving myself. I have to run some errands.”

“Yay!” KC cries. Mako can practically hear the little dance she does in conjunction with the reply. “I’ll call you when we’re done over here. Gotta go.” With that, she hangs up. When Mako looks over, Jem is looking at him with a somewhat hungry edge to his expression.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hi,” Jem replies. He sinks to his knees beside the tub and reaches to take Mako’s phone from him, places the device safely on top of the toilet tank. “Where are you going? What errands?” It is through the good grace of their twenty-two years knowing each other that the curtness of each question doesn’t come across as rude, just refreshingly straightforward.

“KC and Godfrey want to do dinner. I’m assuming June, Gloria, and Cyn are coming, too.”

“Your ecosystem,” Jem hums. 

Mako nods. “Yeah.” 

“June’s coming? I thought she was on tour.”

“KC told me she just got back.”

“Oh, cool.”

“Yeah. Cool.” Mako sinks into the bathwater until its steaming surface kisses his chin. “Also, guess what happened just now? Mum yelled at me to go to the grocery store so now I have to do that tonight. Woohoo!”

Jem, in his unfailingly altruistic, almost scarily Mako-centric manner, immediately shakes his head and says, “I’ll go.” Mako shakes his head right back, and for a moment, they are both just sitting there very near to the ground, silently no-ing at each other. 

“It has to be me. You don’t understand. It  _ has _ to be me, otherwise I’m the most horrible, useless, lazy piece of shit in human history.”

Jem’s brow furrows in confusion. “I don’t… I don’t think that’s how human worth works.”

“That’s how it works with Rui Ngata.” Mako is nearly overtaken by the urge to submerge his head wholly in the bath; instead, he pillows his cheek against the lip of the tub and closes his eyes, breathing hard. “I just love this so much, you know? Life, living. Spending money. Indoor plumbing. It makes having been born so worth it.”

A second of silence and stillness passes before Jem’s fingers press against his scalp, raking down through his thick, fat curls to the nape of his neck. “You’re being dark,” Jem murmurs. 

“Ooh, and don’t you love it?”

“I don’t,” Jem says, but his mouth is then brushing over Mako’s forehead, and without thinking or opening his eyes, Mako is seeking that mouth with his own, parting his lips and licking at Jem until the other’s tongue comes out to play as well.

“I can’t tell what kind of mood you’re in,” Jem mutters against the corner of his mouth, groaning when Mako’s arms come up out of the water to hook around his neck and shoulders and pull him in closer, wetting his shirt.

“Me neither,” Mako laughs. He pushes the side of his face into Jem’s, and they are breathing together, alive and awake and, most importantly, present.

He sits in the bath for between ten and twenty more minutes, waiting for the water to chill to uncomfortable lukewarmth and listening to Jem putter around in the next room amidst his chosen soundtrack. Out of the tub, he eats a hydroxyzine and starts to put on a nice shirt – something with cornflower blue stripes and tiny yellow flowers dotted all over – then changes his mind upon checking the temperature and just throws on an old and thick sweatshirt with a hole slowly growing just beneath the neckline. He pieces together a grocery list in the Notes app on his phone from Mum’s admittedly cursory account of what the household is lacking and his own knowledge of the kitchen’s contents – deli meat, the ever so important cucumbers, Kory’s beloved muffins, chicken and beef and tender cuts of lamb. When Jem tells him he’s going to take care of dinner tonight, Mako looks up from his smartphone so fast he gives himself whiplash.

“ _ You’re _ doing dinner?” he asks. The last time Jem tried to prepare something more complex than, say, microwave popcorn, they had to throw out Mako’s best frying pan and destroy the smoke detector with a broom handle to get it to stop screaming.

“Yeah.” Jem, sitting at the foot of the bed with his laptop open, gives Mako a look that he’s seen at least once a day for the past five years: the one that telegraphs both his steadfast insanity and the fact of Jem’s unceasing affection for him, two things that have, somehow, managed to exist in easy harmony with each other for what seems like forever now.

Mako blinks. “Wouldn’t you rather, like, I don’t know. Love yourself and order a pizza?”

Jem narrows his eyes briefly, sarcastically. “What did you think I was going to do?”

Defensively, Mako raises his hands, then swiftly turns back to his grocery list. “Kory likes margherita,” he says.

“I know,” is Jem’s even, room temperature reply.

At 7:14 PM, KC gives Mako the green light and he proceeds to sneak out of the house, having kissed Jem goodbye, poked his head into his daughter’s room, found Kory sleeping, and spent just upwards of three minutes listening intently at the top of the stairs for any overt signs of life in the living room and kitchen. Hearing nothing, he crept down the stairs and through the front door with a deliberate feather touch to his movements; now, he sits breathing translucent vapor clouds into the air of the Jetta’s front seat, starting the car and turning the heater all the way up to  _ 80 Fahrenheit _ . 

On the drive over to Uptown, the hydroxyzine begins to set in. Binds to all of his H 1 receptors; antagonizes the serotonin 5-HT 2A receptors, the dopamine D 2 receptors, the α 1 -adrenergic receptors; crosses the blood-brain barrier; ushers in sweet, subtle brainfog. By the time he reaches South Claiborne Avenue, he feels distinctly deadened – not dead as in void of all life and feeling, but dead as in dead weight, something in the core of him desensitized and rendered heavier and clumsier and only half-pleasantly permeated through and through with dense, thousand-ton mist. While he is not an entire zombie, he’s in the nebulous place between the state of electric stress he perpetually exists in and sleepwalking: the bizarro version of actual normalcy, a sensation of having his head underwater and being filled head-to-toe with wispy cotton candy. Taking all of this into account, the rest of the night should be a whole world of fun.

KC is the first person Mako sees when he pulls into the parking lot at Bayou Hot Wings, standing beside the outdoor metal bench tables that constitute the joint’s only seating. She’s a brown, pear-shaped egret with pianist fingers, broad and featherless wings that are slightly too long for her body, hair a thick Afro poof, and thunder thighs that stretch the watercolor pattern of her yoga pants. Kai is standing behind her, hanging off of her waist with his arms thrown around her and his small hands grasping at the front of her Jimi Hendrix T-shirt, the one Mako has known for years to be her favorite.

“Lookie, lookie!” she cries when he steps out of the Jetta, spreading her arms in his direction long before he’s close enough to just melt into them. Once he’s within her grasp, her hands are going up into his hair and molding themselves to the shape of his skull, and she’s talking so much: “There you are, my favorite person, the love of my life with the barely qualifiable exception of my husband and my son. Where’s Jem? I know I didn’t say you could bring him, but you could’ve brought him if you wanted! My bad. Oh my God, look at your face! You’re so pretty today! I knew you’d like those spiral gauges.” She flicks at them with her thumbs. “I saw them at the French Market and just, instantly, I thought of you. I should’ve worn mine today, then we’d match.  _ Fuck _ , I’m talking a lot. I’m just so happy to see you! How are you?”

Mako allows his mouth to soften at the corners. “I took a hydroxyzine thirty minutes ago and I’m ready to start drinking.”

KC grins and pats his face. “That’s my boy.”

Kai is peering up at Mako from behind the ample swell of KC’s behind, shy as he always is in the nascent stages of any interaction. Mako tilts his head to the side to return his godson’s curious gaze; reaching a hand out to him, he asks, “What’s up, duder? You gonna give me a hug, or what?”

This being about all the coaxing he needs, Kai emerges from his shell and throws himself into Mako’s thighs, giggling with delight when Mako hooks his hands beneath his armpits and scoops him up into a dizzying, swirling, sideways-twirling hug. The boy encircles his legs about his godfather’s waist, his arms about his neck, and says, “I got a new toy at school today.”

With the ease that comes from fourteen years of practice, Mako feigns the greatest enthusiasm. “Really? What kind?”

“It was an Iron Man action figure, with, with, with blaster sounds and a light-up arc reactor.”

“A light-up arc reactor?” Turning to KC, Mako asks, “Isn’t Iron Man like, a totally inappropriate superhero for this current sociopolitical climate, considering he’s just a rich, jingoistic white dude who takes the law into his hands because he can get away with it–?”

“Don’t fucking say that, dude!” Briefly, KC’s hand covers Mako’s mouth; she laughs when he bites gently at her palm. Reaching out to gently ruffle Kai’s curls, KC says, “In  _ our _ house, Iron Man is a black man who builds medical equipment for poor hospitals and gives roller skates to inner city kids. What’s his name, baby?”

“Antwone Demetrius Stark,” Kai declares.

“Antwone Demetrius Stark,” Mako parrots. He bounces Kai against his hip. “I can get down with that.”

Gloria and Cynthia are sitting at a table close to the door, the former with her right arm slung around the latter’s shoulders, her mouth pressed into Cynthia’s wild Samoan hair. As Mako approaches with Kai in his arms and KC at his side, he grins, calls out, “Lookin’ good, Cyn! I always love to see that beautiful resting bitch face.”

Cynthia, sipping a grapefruit Abita from the liquor store across the street, shows him the back of her middle finger. Gloria raises her head to give Mako a look of dull, droll surprise. “Are you heckling my wife?” she asks. “Are you really out here heckling my wife in my presence?”

“Only ‘cause she loves it,” he replies.

“I’m desensitized to bullshit,” Cynthia coolly observes.

At that moment, Godfrey pops out of Bayou Hot Wings with two twenty-piece baskets of chicken wings and a plethora of dipping sauces. 

“Eat ‘em and weep, folks,” he announces, plopping his loot down on the metal lattice of the table. “I got Bayou Sweet Heat, garlic butter Parmesan, Thai chili glaze, chipotle barbecue, and pepper jelly. If you want frog legs or alligator, get that nasty shit yourself, ‘cause I’m not paying for it.”

“Hey, baby, can you get the rest of that beer out of the car?” KC asks, leaning in to kiss Godfrey and frowning when he jerks away, his brow creased. 

“Why?”

“Because I promised Mako a drink and you love me, like, so very much.”

Godfrey looks at Mako, sitting with Kai in his lap, the little one reaching out and upward to play with the curls falling over his face. Mako gives him his cutest, most deeply loving smile; KC mirrors the expression soon after. Godfrey’s features gel. 

“Fine,” he breathes, kissing KC and then going over to rub his cheek against the top of Mako’s head, his affection always canine and always welcome. “But only because I made a resolution to be more generous this year.”

“I love you!” KC and Mako call out in unison. Godfrey doesn’t halt his retreat, just waves a hand of silent acknowledgement in the air and continues in the direction of his and KC’s nondescript white Pontiac G6. 

In the biting mid-winter chill and the amber-lit darkness of the early evening, cuddling with a six year-old and flanked on either side by the hippest radio duo in the Crescent City, Mako drinks grapefruity beer and munches on lightly battered chicken wings dipped in spicy-sweet pepper jelly. He is with friends, with Godfrey, a Taiwanese-American ex-lawyer of supermodelesque beauty; with KC, an ethical slut of fantastic proportions and the mystic bisexual queen of Mid-City; with Gloria, a Louisiana Creole with a big, brown sugar heart; and with Cynthia, the socially anxious strong and silent type of their small, kind of ridiculous confederacy. When June – their favorite intersex indie poet of Midwestern coffeeshop fame – bikes in clad in a pastel pink faux-fur coat and with her long hair blowing with a sort of movie star glamour in the wind, the Overly Diversity-Representative Sacred Order of the New Orleans Drinking Buddies is complete, and Mako can feel his heart floating happily in the sea of his chest, buoyant with good company, good meds, and good booze.

“You guys, I forgot about all my favorites at work while I was gone.” June, sitting beside Gloria and Cynthia and thumbing lipstick from the skin just beneath her mouth, presides over the table with the air of a high priestess, her characteristic wilting flower introversion giving way to an outpouring of energy in the wake of her return to New Orleans. “My first customer today was that guy who starts like, every story he tells me with, ‘ _ Ever since Reagan kicked me out of my mental hospital _ …’”

“I identify with that guy,” KC says. Mako struggles to keep his beer in his mouth; Godfrey, on the other hand, spits his all over the chicken wings, garnering him a sharp glare from Cynthia.

“I was eating that,” she says, pushing the basket and the cup of Thai chili glaze she’s been monopolizing over to Godfrey, Mako, and KC’s side of the table.

“It’s just my icky heterosexual cooties,” Godfrey retorts. Meanwhile, at the other end of the table, June is still talking.

“Then there was that white woman with the puke green dreadlocks–”

“ _ Eugh _ ,” Mako, KC, and Gloria all groan at the same time.

“– who sings, like actually belting out, balladizing, having her own one-woman concert  _ sings _ while she’s browsing through the records.” June reaches behind her head to pull her lank, unwashed hair into a high ponytail. “She’s actually kind of my hero. I feel like she believes in something.”

“Cultural appropriation?” KC asks.

“Living life on her own terms.” June flicks her ponytail over her shoulder with a wry, wolfish smile. “And cultural appropriation.”

Feeling just this shy of drunk, Mako  _ hmm _ s. “Everyone has to live for something.”

“Then there was the man that drops in every single afternoon without fail to go to the bathroom for like an hour and a half.” Idly, June picks at the batter stuck to one particularly crispy, unsauced chicken wing without demonstrating any desire to eat it. “If he has a heart attack and dies in my bathroom, I’m fucking quitting my job.”

Godfrey yawns. “Why would he have a heart attack?”

KC ducks her head around Mako and Kai to shoot her husband a piercing look. “You know why.”

“Oh, come on,” he says. “It’s not physically possible for someone to strain to shit so bad they literally go into cardiac arrest.”

“You say that clearly having never experienced true constipation,” Mako interjects. “Did I ever tell you guys the story of the worst thing that ever happened to me in my life?”

“The story of the day you met Godfrey?” Gloria asks. Godfrey blows a raspberry.

“The story of you moving to New Orleans?” comes June’s equally sassy addition. 

“Strong contenders, my friends, but no. It’s the story of the day I was literally so backed up with pure fecal matter that I couldn’t even shit. I couldn’t get it out.”

Throwing her hands up into the air, Gloria announces, “I give up. I’m not having a meal with any of you anymore.”

“Except for me,” Cynthia notes.

“Except for Cyn.” Gloria gives Cynthia’s hand an affectionate squeeze over the tabletop.

“Are you implying that you still have yet to shit?” KC asks, trying and failing to stifle her cotton candy, schoolgirl giggle in her hands. “That you’ve been, what, fecally impacted for months if not years?”

“Of course not,” Mako drawls in his silly Kiwi intonation. “Jem gave me an enema.”

“Wouldn’t he be giving you enemas on a regular basis anyway?” June asks, genuinely and unironically interrogative. “Do gays just not have anal sex anymore? Has it become gauche?”

“Bruh, we don’t have time for all that,” Mako scoffs. “In our house, it’s shit-dick or bust.”

“I’m going to scream!” Gloria screams.

“I haven’t even gotten to the best part yet.” Pausing to sip from his Abita, Mako’s expression hovers somewhere between unbearable mirth and utter solemnity, his mouth quivering with the effort of restraining an outright grin, his eyes fluttering momentarily closed. “When I finally did, in fact, shit, it was so big we couldn’t flush it down the toilet.”

“Oh my God!” KC cries, keeling over sideways and howling with laughter into the Uptown asphalt beneath them all.

“We literally had to break it up with a spoon. You don’t know true love until you’ve had someone spray water up your ass and chop your shit into pieces for you.”

Godfrey tilts the neck of his beer bottle in Mako’s direction. “Cheers to that, bro.”

“So the point is, yes – my man at Sisters in Christ could definitely shit himself and die one day on my watch,” June says with a matter-of-fact straightforwardness, pointedly directing the utterance at Godfrey. Godfrey screws his face up in an expression of stubborn disapproval.

“Okay, okay,  _ yeah _ , but he could just as easily be doing something else in the bathroom besides shitting.”

“Occam’s razor,” Mako says with Kai’s hands creeping playfully up to his mouth, the tiny fingers pushing the corners of his lips upwards. “He’s shitting.”

“What the fuck is Ocko’s ladle? Is that what you said?”

“ _ Occam’s razor! _ ” Mako yells around Kai’s probing fingers. “The simplest answer is often the correct one.” Shaking his head, he ducks down and around to blow warm air into Kai’s right ear, tickled when the boy shrieks with glee and shoves at his chest in response. “It’s like you’ve never watched an episode of  _ House _ in your life.”

“Dude, that’s so boring.” Godfrey pops a bit of crispy, fried batter into his mouth. “You know what’s  _ not _ boring? An on-the-go meth lab.” He flickers his eyes over to June. “Does your guy have busted teeth?”

June breaks down into laughter for all of two seconds, then goes completely straight-faced and says, “I don’t look that closely at him, man.”

“I like the idea that he’s building a tunnel,” KC puts in, leaning into Mako’s side to play with both his curls and those of her son. “He’s a witch and he’s excavating a modern-day underground railroad for his fellow mystics, and he uses glamour magic to hide the tunnel so normies can’t see it.”

“Isn’t everyone a witch to you?” Gloria asks.

“No.” KC gives her a beautiful, caustic smile. “I can feel this guy’s energy. It’s calling to me.”

“Wouldn’t it make much more sense for this man – who, for reasons that escape me, we care about so much – to just be a homeless guy who’s doing his daily grooming regimen?” Cynthia interjects, sounding vaguely irritated (which, to be honest, is how she almost always sounds).

“He wears different clothes every day, though,” June notes, still playing with her uneaten chicken wing until KC finally steals it from between her fingers and shoves it into her mouth, smirking all the while. Gloria pauses mid-sip to speak.

“He could still be homeless.”

“Where would he keep his clothes?” June asks.

“In the magical underground tunnel system he’s building all over New Orleans,” Mako smartly replies, pulling laughs out of the whole table – even out of Cynthia, who is hard-pressed to smile even on her best days.

After dinner and drinking, there is smoking in the parking lot, loitering around Godfrey and KC’s car while Godfrey and Kai sit together in the driver’s seat, rifling through the CDs in the armrest compartment. Mako stands with KC, Gloria, and June on the oil-slick asphalt, collecting smoke and tar in his lungs, and as he taps the first stray ashes off the end of his cigarette, he asks the congregation, “Why the fuck do we do this?”

June – two inches taller than his six feet, watching him with a sort of dark and happy look on her face – shivers a little in her pink and asks, “Do what? Act like we hate each other and call it love?”

“Y’all just do that shit to me,” Godfrey calls from inside the car, sitting with his cig hung out of the open window so that Kai doesn’t inhale the smoke. Strewn across his lap, Kai wiggles into a more comfortable position in which to browse; Godfrey brings his cigarette to his lips and says, “It’s called reverse homophobia. Heterophobia, if you will.”

“Fuck off,” KC, June, and Gloria all bark out in unison, then simultaneously break down laughing.

“No,” Mako says. He waits until the laughter dies down before he continues. “I mean, why do we get together and drink on Monday nights?”

“Oh, well that’s easy.” KC smiles, and the stretch of her full mouth across her full face is just as beautiful as Godfrey’s smile was months earlier, eating sushi and talking trash – not perfect like his, not the sharpness of flawlessly formed teeth and all the angles of a chiseled and faultless face – but so breathtakingly genuine and sweet as to briefly astound Mako. “Sometimes I hate my job and I have to get stupid plastered on a work night so I don’t completely lose the will to live,” she says.

“I’m just the chauffeur,” Godfrey notes, then pulls his fresh beer up out of the cup holder and takes a long sip.

“It’s hard, acting happy every day.” KC sticks her cigarette between her lips and puffs. “To be fair, it’s not like anyone but Godfrey is watching me while I work, and most of my job is just me talking about complete bullshit, but like… that shit is difficult, nigga. I’m not always in the mood. Sometimes I don’t want to be cheery, or funny, or even scathingly sarcastic, which is like breathing for me. Sometimes I don’t want to talk at all.” She exhales a Chinese dragon of smoke into the thick air of tonight, leaning her head back and giving Mako a steady, deeply loving look. “You know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” Mako murmurs. Slurps long from his own beer. “Sounds sort of like the prelude to alcoholism, I reckon, but yeah, I get it.” 

KC  _ tsks _ , shoving the heel of her palm into his right shoulder. “Why do you do it, huh?” she asks. In a droll, impromptu mockery of his accent: “You silly old… Kiwi bloke.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Mako shakes his head, sheepy curls bouncing back and forth, a low  _ bblbblbblbb _ noise emerging from between his blubbering lips. He regards KC – his best New Orleans friend, the love of his life with the quite qualifiable exception of Jem and his daughter – with a sad, candid, and kind of painful smile on his face, the corners of it cutting at the tender places inside his skin. “I’m depressed and my mum has cancer and there’s a part of me that hates her even though she’s literally probably dying. I thought skulling one might help.”

And, well. There it is, isn’t it?

As soon as the words have left him, he regrets having said them at all. It’s too much, too real, and there is only so much weight an Atlas Monday night can bear. He wants to put his face in his hands and tiptoe away backwards. Wants to disappear into the blackness and the heaviness of the night. Wants to be violently shaken until he feels some type of visceral, living, unzombified way again. He does none of these things, because KC, Godfrey, Gloria, and June are all watching him with their hearts bloody and alive on their faces, cigarettes burning, the light-polluted sky heaven above.

Breaking the silence, Godfrey softly says, “It’s like that sometimes.”

KC snorts. “Nigga, sometimes? It’s like that  _ all  _ the time on this bitch of an earth.”

Into the air, Mako laughs – a high, elephantine sound that resembles the jazz emerging from Godfrey’s radio in pretty coffee dribbles until Kai tires of it and switches the CD out for KC and the Sunshine Band. He finishes his cigarette. He lets the booze go to his head. He listens to KC and Godfrey talk on and on.

“Do you ever think about, like, all the people you know and all the people they know and all the people they know know? And so on, and so forth?”

“Babe, what the fuck are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about the seven degrees of Kevin Bacon,  _ Godfrey _ , okay? Please  _ educate _ yourself.”

“Okay, yes, seven degrees. What’s your point?”

“My point is, I guess, how small the world is. I mean, the theory is that we’re all, at most, seven degrees away from knowing literally everybody on Earth. You’re one degree from all my crustpunk exes, and that’s, eugh, horrifying. Axel used to tell me all the time that his mom met the Dalai Lama. So that makes me two degrees away from the  _ fucking Dalai Lama _ , and you three degrees away from him! That makes me three degrees away from literally everyone the Dalai Lama has met! American presidents! The Buddhist god himself!”

“Buddhism doesn’t work like that.”

“Whaddayu mean?”

“I mean, Buddhism doesn’t have a god.”

“The Buddha?!”

“He’s not a  _ god _ , hon, he’s like… the most enlightened being and teacher in the universe.”

“Ergo, a god?”

“That’s not how it fucking works! You can’t just transplant your own conception of how religion works onto Buddhism because you don’t understand it!”

“Wow, okay, fussing at me? While I’m half-drunk and look, by the way, so hot? Not a good look, baby.”

“Can we please talk about Kevin Bacon again? I feel like that was a better conversation.”

“What was I even saying? There was a point. I think I made it already.”

“The world is small.”

“It’s teeny-tiny.”

“It’s infinitesimal even.”

“Ooh, look at you go with your, your, your Mister Scripps spelling bee vocabulary.”

“You’re so into my big words. My big, fat, hard words.”

“Not in front of Mako, baby, he’s emotionally fragile! Gahdamn!”

Mako, for his part, just doubles over and giggles like a little girl. When KC’s hand with the chipped and busted manicure comes over to gently pet his scalp, he leans into it, into her – a woman he feels so much love for he could damn near explode with it.

Is New Orleans a city in love? A city in spur-of-the-moment, accidental, unasked and unaccounted for infatuation? A city weaving in and out of time, the temperature ever rising, the clocks melting, the river water spilling out, the hands folding over one another one by one by one? Mako wonders while watching KC dance to “Boogie Shoes” – her twirling around in an empty parking space, popping her hips encased in rainbow oil spill polyester and nylon, clapping her long egret hands in time to the drummer’s brisk beat, bouncing. A minute and a half into her Josephine Baker solo act, she tugs a tipsy Mako over and bops him from side to side. “Dance with me, baby,” she says in that honey and thunder Crescent City voice of hers, entwining their tattooed arms together while June jumps over and comes to bump Mako’s right hip with her own until they’re grooving. Until the music pools and folds and swirls like candy-striped liquid taffy between them. Until Mako feels kind of like he’s in Wellington again, barring the distinctly New Orleans sound of  _ brrrump! brrrump! _ trumpet peals, the distinctly New Orleans smell of beer and fried food, the distinctly New Orleans friends spinning him around between them while he rocks and two-steps and boogies from side to side – a confederacy he isn’t quite sure how he ended up in. He is socially-underequipped, breathtakingly anxious, fucked up, and lonely. Lovely, violet strangeness grips him like a vice. He feels so good right now, and it’s the weirdest and worst thing he’s yet experienced on the North American continent. When he kisses everyone goodbye, he feels as though his heart is six feet deep in the ground.

Standing in the Whole Foods on Magazine Street, gazing blindly at Saran wrapped packages of chicken legs and trying to compare them with a brain that feels as though it is half-absent, leaking out of the bottom of his skull and trying to make a new home in the place between his shoulder blades, Mako pulls his phone out of his back pocket and finds his group text with Godfrey and KC.

#    
  


**Today** 9:02 PM

**mako gehringer  
** i miss you guys already

i’m standing here in whole foods halfway to drunk and about to literally start crying omg i was having such a bad day before i saw y’all and now all i can think about is the fact that y’all have literally saved my life so many times over the past eight years

can i make you guys a cake? a thank you for being awesome cake?

**kc ra** **msey**

omg mako!!! we love you so much!!! i know you said you and jem were engaged but uh i think it’s time to institute that polygamous marriage we’ve been talking about

**godfrey yen  
** Sister husbands here we come ;)

**kc ramsey  
** you can make us whatever you want, baby. i love you so much!!!

**godfrey yen  
** What she said. If you make something chocolate please be prepared for the orgy that will commence

**mako gehringer  
** you’d go bi for chocolate?

**godfrey yen  
** I’d go bi for YOU, Mako 

(and chocolate. especially chocolate.)

#    
  


Momentarily empowered, temporarily (and this is the most important thing, the most important thing of all) not alone, Mako puts the first package of chicken he sees in his shopping cart and keeps on trucking. When he gets home, Kory and Jem help him put all the groceries away and do not ask questions or make undue comments about his deficient hand-eye coordination – just pick the vegetables up off the floor when he fumbles them and tell him about the crazy Louisiana pizza they had for dinner.

“It had crawfish on it,” Kory complains in her old T-shirt and mesh gym shorts pajamas, stuffing a bite-sized plastic jar of lavender-flavored gelato into some elusive unoccupied space in the freezer. Jem sighs – a practiced expression of shamefaced, grudging apology. 

“I thought it would be interesting,” he says. “Variety is the spice of life, and all that shit.” Jem looks at Mako for support, for a reaction, for anything overt and in this moment at all, and finds him staring mildly at a container of chocolate chip muffins, his hand cupped beneath his chin and jaw. “What?”

Mako raises the muffins to chest height. “I got the wrong kind.”

Kory, entirely unflustered, takes the bin from his hands and puts it on top of the fridge, getting up on the tips of her toes to reach all the way. “Chocolate chip is fine,” she says. She and Jem lock knowing and communicative eyes. “Maybe you should go to bed, Daddy. You look tired.”

“Yeah,” Mako mutters. He stretches an arm out for Kory, and she is there, wrapping herself around him in tonight’s variation of the goodnight hug, squishing their bodies together, pushing her forehead into his lips so that he might kiss it three times in rapid succession. “Don’t stay up too late.”

“I won’t,” comes her earnest reply. Mako takes the stairs slowly, gripping the hand railing for dear life like the decrepit old man he sometimes feels as though he is rapidly becoming. 

That night, when Jem comes to bed, he presses the whole of his body against Mako’s back – chest to shoulder blades, stomach to spine, pelvis to glutes, shins to calves – and Mako, in his swimming in blue, half-tired half-wired, unbearably alive and feeling every possible emotion at once state moans, brings his hand around and grabs Jem by the hip and squeezes, hard.

“Fuck,” he says, instantly erect. “Fuck me.”

He can feel Jem straining to question him, to ask all the super nice, adult things like “Are you okay?” and “How do you want me?” and even “Why?” – of all queries, why “Why?” – so he grips Jem’s hand and pulls it down and around to press the palm into his groin.

He says it again. “Fuck me.”

He cannot stand to be alone.

Jem stills, then slips Mako’s briefs down over the prominence of his hip and buttock.

Mako is so happy with this that he almost weeps in his relief.

Jem takes him from behind, with an open mouth telegraphing wet kisses across the nape of his neck and the delicate shell of his ear and a hand anchored down against the furry center of his stomach, occasionally straying downward to pull insistently, affectionately at his dick. It is an almost adolescent affair, so much of it the quick and dirty pleasure of simply rutting hard against each other, Mako burying his hot flushed face into the pillow and groaning out, “Please,” so low and so desperate until Jem finally rears up over him, pushes him down into the mattress, and just has the fuck at him, pistons into him hard and fast and the way he wants to be loved, the way he needs it. He wonders, in the part of his mind not screaming, if Jem has the same muscle memory as he does, if his body remembers their first time in this bed, in this city, the slow religious worship of fingers and tongues over skin, tracing every contour, the joy of thighs slipping against each other, of every manic breath and prolonged instance of eye contact, the hilarity of Mako’s head accidentally slamming into the headboard, and then they couldn’t stop laughing at each other, couldn’t stop kissing – but now, they don’t laugh, nor do they touch their mouths together. Now, it is just breathing, gasping, begging, Mako raising his head up off the pillow to cry out in the window’s open and glassy direction, his flush spreading bloody down his face over his neck and into the lower regions of his chest and belly, the night a thick gelatin envelope over their skin and eyes and bones, Jem’s treatment of him uncharacteristically vicious and so tender that it hurts.

“Mako,” Jem calls out amidst the obscene slapping of skin against skin, a warning.

Mako closes his eyes and lets his head hang down. Every muscle in his body turns to stone, implicitly daring Jem to let go. “Uh-hunh.”

Jem grips his hips tight enough to bruise, fingers digging into skin and muscle and bone, reaching for marrow. Courteously, he allows his dick to slide slickly out of Mako before he comes, spilling pungent spunk over the dip of the other’s lower back. Breathing hard, Jem reaches beneath Mako’s stomach to jack him off against the sheets until he too is slack and filled with cool, heady night air, his body made of sweet strawberry jelly, his head a blissfully hollow vase. In the somewhat violent afterglow, Jem lies beside and half-underneath Mako out of the way of the semen stain and, raising a hand to his face, begins to laugh. Mako tilts his head back just enough to look at the other in the dark.

“What’s so funny?”

“It’s stupid,” Jem murmurs, still laughing.

“Tell me anyway.”

Jem returns Mako’s gaze, their faces so close that Jem’s two eyes look like one hazel cyclops orb. “I was just inside you,” he giggles. Mako kind of wants to punch him in the head, but in a loving way.

“Are you twelve?” he asks instead.

“You make me feel twelve.” Jem’s right hand, pinned beneath Mako’s abdomen, wriggles itself free to brush gently, tenderly over the other’s backside; its owner blinks his expression into sudden, receptive seriousness. “What the hell was that?”

“I’m having a really weird day, okay?” Mako closes his eyes before changing his mind and opening them again, terrified to not be looking right at Jem. “This morning I thought, what if I only proposed to you because I’m afraid of dying alone? And then I got so disgusted with myself that I literally had to take my smoke break an hour early and dry heave in the car for twenty minutes. And I love you so much. I don’t think I told you that today.”

“You tell me that every day.”

“And you don’t get tired of it? You haven’t been so desensitized to the words that they’ve lost all meaning?”

“No.” Jem pinches his ass cheek until his leg jerks out and almost knees Jem in the groin; together, they laugh, breathing each other’s air. “Also, of course that’s why you proposed to me, bro. Why the fuck else do people get married?”

Mako frowns. “Because they’re in love.”

Jem scoffs and rolls his pretty cyclops eye. “Bullshit reason. Unrealistic.”

“I’m so in love with you, though.” Mako can feel stupid, infantile tears coming on, so he squeezes his eyes as tightly closed as they will go and exhales hard through his mouth. “I’ve always been so bad to you but I love you so much it saves me–”

“Shhh.” Jem’s mouth seals itself around Mako’s bottom lip, sucking on it, approximating a kiss. “You’re not bad to me. You’re just occasionally very difficult.”

“Death to difficult people.”

“You make my life so much more interesting than it ever would be without you in it, Mako.” It is the sweetest and the meanest thing Mako has ever heard, so he bites his lip and tries to memorize every aspect of the moment. He wants to remember it all for tomorrow morning.

They fall asleep.

Over the next three days, they watch a tropical depression named Alyson slide across the Caribbean and slowly into the Gulf of Mexico. It is the earliest start of hurricane season the Atlantic seaboard has seen in decades; on the news, meteorologists and anchormen have generic, stereotyped conversations about “climate change” and “back in the day.” Wednesday afternoon, Kory comes home from school with news that classes have been cancelled for the rest of the week in anticipation of the inclement weather. On Thursday, Mako drives to China’s office in Uptown through dirty gray seas sloshing their waters over the highway and into the Crescent City streets, Poseidon weeping openly from up above, dampening everything with his heavy primordial tears.

China has an unsettled look about her when Mako steps into her office. “I’m about to do something really bad to you,” she says to him.

Folding his leather jacket over his arm, Mako smiles at the weirdness of her statement, the weirdness of China doing anything that could be considered even remotely wrong or bad; to him, she has always been practically angelic. “Oh, yeah?”

“I’ve been needing to pee for the past half an hour and I can’t hold it anymore.” She puts on a deeply apologetic expression. “I’m going to run to the bathroom really quick, okay? I’m so sorry.”

“Please.” He waves a dismissive hand in the air and takes his usual seat beside the window. “Go ahead. I’ll talk to myself until you get back, get a head start on today’s therapy.”

“Don’t make me laugh,” she says, and then she’s gone, the latch not quite catching when she closes the door behind her.

Alone in the pale, almost Arctic-colored box of China’s office, Mako sits and spins his thoughts out and around like cotton candy, collecting them with his fingers, not yet letting them melt in his mouth. Today, he plans to talk about his utter, hideous wrongness as an adult and a person, the fact that the only thing he’s good at anymore is being a father and that, friends, is something he didn’t really sign up for when he joined this: the insanely stupid tribe known as humanity. 

“Why don’t you think you’re good at anything?” he can hear already hear China asking – searching for proof as she does, confirming the veracity of his claims. He rehearses his answer out loud.

“Because ever since Kory was born, I’ve been different. I’m not talking about fatherhood, but that’s a part of it. I’ve been doing everything right. I take my medicine, I eat three times a day, I smoke so I don’t kill myself and I stab myself with the nearest sharp object every time I feel like panicking and moving back to Wellington or some crazy shit like that, but I’m still… wrong. I’m just wrong. I’m talking about… the fact that my brain has literally just been a glorified scrambled egg for the past fourteen years, and I can’t think anymore without the thoughts immediately flying out of my head or turning into these huge, scary things I can’t keep my mental hands around. I’m tired constantly. Any excuse to be lazy or very boringly self-destructive is a godsend. I’m subjectively a smart, creative, funny fucking person who’s just… always running on empty because I can’t get my brain to work and I can’t draw from reservoirs of anxiety or compulsion to compensate. And it’s rubbing off on my relationships, too. I can’t have high-stakes conversations with my mum – even now, when she might be dead before the year is up. I ghost on Jem because it’s easier to act like I’m not feeling anything at all than it is to acknowledge that I’m feeling everything and then have to deal with talking with him about it, which is exhausting. I feel like I’m friends with my friends because they distract me from everything shitty in my life, not because, I don’t know. Because of some deep and poignant intellectual kinship or whatever. Let’s not even get started on my dad and Robbie; I almost never talk to them anymore at all. Somehow, even after having a child and writing for a living and moving to America, I’m still, to myself, the most stagnant human rubbish fire in the universe. I’m not who I wanted to be. I don’t know if I’ll ever be.”

Imaginary China says, with a voice like violet gossamer, “You don’t have to be good at everything, you know.”

She says, “Did you forget that you’re just a normal adult with a slightly abnormal illness?” and laughs. Silly boy. Silly, stupid little boy.

She asks, “Are you trying your best, Mako? Because that’s all you can fairly ask of yourself at this point.”

Mako cannot for the life of him say no. The door opens, and China is there, smiling at him with a face full of love.


	13. 13

#  _ 13 _

Mum spends the month of January being angry at just about everyone, Mako especially. The anger is an autonomous, physiological event – delightful in its regularity, eldritch in its scope. Mako feels that maybe he deserves to be the target of such anger for his years of professional laziness; for deigning to vandalize his body not with  _ tā moko _ , but with the vulgar representational images of the East and West; for his perpetually smart mouth, which he inherited from her and yet was never supposed to nurture into painfully sarcastic and occasionally even mean maturity; for secretly despising her for so long, even as he has loved her so very much. Through the first four weeks of the new year, every gaffe and misstep is cause for some impossibly sharp comment over coffee and dinner and the ten o’clock news – Mum’s quiet rage festering close enough to her skin to raise boils and blight the house with infection; Mako retreating every night to bed and pathetically begging Jem for release; Kory implementing instinctual survival behaviors by staying in her room and primarily speaking when spoken to; Jem caught somewhere in the crossfire of all this, trying to keep everyone happy in his own quiet and unassuming way.

On the night of January 28 th , Mako checks his mother’s horoscope while Jem showers in the next room and post-coital sweat cools on his skin, evaporating slowly in the damp South Louisiana air.

#    
  


**♈ ARIES, JANUARY 2025 ♈**

Ruled by the headstrong and determined Ram, Aries energy this month can be stubborn and willful. It will cause you to dig in your heels, stand your ground and refuse to be pushed around. Under the influence of an Aries planetary transit, you may butt your own metaphorical Ram’s horns against the same obstacle until you break it down — often with sheer force of will. The essence of Aries energy shows up as encouraging, unstoppable, bold, devoted, heroic and caring. In its shadow form, Aries energy can make you prideful, self-centered, impulsive, bossy, stubborn, reckless, and competitive. This sign likes a challenge, but be careful not to become selfish or domineering under Aries’ influence.

Patience, Ram. Progress could grind to a halt — or even backslide — on January 10 as your cosmic custodian, active Mars, shifts into his annual retrograde motion. This year, the reversal starts in Aquarius and your eleventh house of technology and collaboration (until February 12), and then it’ll retreat into Capricorn and your career house until February 27. Over the coming two months, you might experience some slowdowns or even work stoppages on a Team Aries project. While pushing, arguing, and cajoling might make you feel better in the moment, none of that is likely to have much of a positive effect. Assuming a passive (or passive-aggressive) attitude is probably worse, however. Pick your battles carefully. This may be a little challenging with forthright Mars in reverse. Since retrogrades rule the past, you may reconnect with old friends or colleagues who are involved with programs to improve the world. In your personal life, with Mars retrograde, you might prefer to stay more insulated with your innermost circle.

Worries over money could have you edgier than usual, Aries. While you may be doing well, you still could be insecure and think your funds might not stretch far enough. Try to consider the situation objectively. You'll probably be relieved by what you find. Others' demands on your time might irritate you more than usual. The best way to escape this kind of tension is to go for a workout or walk.

#    
  


Lying alone and naked in the center of the mattress, Mako studies the cottage cheese texture of the ceiling and considers these words. Through the sheer curtains over the window above the bed, he can vaguely make out the night sky, the dark clouds passing translucently across the stars like butter being slathered over a piece of dry toast. 

“This is bullshit,” he says out loud. Jem produces a long, melodic hum in the shower.

Mere moments later, there is the sound of rapid-fire footsteps pounding against the stairs and Kory’s voice is sailing high-pitched and filled with fright through the wall: “ _ Daddyyyy! Daddyyyy! _ ” Mako just barely manages to throw a blanket over himself and sit up in bed before his bedroom door comes flying open and Kory is standing there in the doorway with eyes the size of dinner plates. He cannot gauge the actual level of the problem’s seriousness from this alone, but he’s almost ninety percent certain that her terror is insect-related. 

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

“There’s a bug downstairs,” Kory says, voice aquiver. Bingo. “It’s-it’s really big.”

Mako pouts. “Where’s Nana?”

“She’s hiding in her room.”

Of course she – a seventy-six year old woman who grew up in the wild New Zealand countryside – has run to her room and cowered. Mako exhales all the contents of his lungs into the damp air. “Close your eyes, baby.”

“Why?” Kory asks, halfway crouched down on the floor with her fingers caught under her toes.

“Do you want to see father naked tonight? Or is that a level of psychological scarring you’d like to save for later?”

She closes her eyes.

Wearing, for the moment, Jem’s  _ Jurassic Park _ boxers (which are loose and slightly too big and leave his gonads uncomfortably swinging to-and-fro with every movement), Mako tramps downstairs in search of a sturdy newspaper and the ballyhooed really big bug. Creeping into the living room with Kory a small, scared presence at his heels, it doesn’t take long for him to spot the fat, ugly cockroach chilling on the front door’s left jamb, antennae mobile, twitching.

“Daddy…”

“I see it, I see it. It’s okay.”

Half-naked, borderline terrified, Mako tiptoes to the door and, with geologic slowness, opens it to the streetlight-buzzing cacophony of the night outside. Winding up his arm with the Times-Picayune, he unleashes what can only be described as pure, mindless chaos on the cockroach – swatting madly at the offending insect amid Kory’s high-pitched wailing and the furious beating of his own heart in his ears – and when the poor, unfortunate creature begins, to his horror, to fly through the air – emitting a low, uncanny hissing noise all the while – all thought leaves his head and he is grabbing Kory and running with her in the direction of Mum’s bedroom, the girl shrieking bansheelike in his arms all the way there.

Mum is sitting cross-legged on her bed when they come flying into her room. At their entrance, the look on her face turns from visibly anxious to profoundly unimpressed. “I gather the roach hasn’t been taken care of?”

Mako detangles himself from Kory’s grasping, clutching arms and surreptitiously straightens his dick. “He’s been shown the door. What he does now is up to him.”

“Oh, yeah. Take a hard line with him.”

“ _ You  _ can talk.” Nervously, Mako cups his groin in his hand and turns away from Kory, who is sitting on the floor with her arms wrapped around her legs. Abruptly, he releases an insane peal of laughter. “Oh my  _ God _ , I can’t believe this is actually happening right now–”

“ _ What _ is that.”

Mako prepares for the worst. “What is what?”

“When the  _ hell _ did you pierce your nipple?!” Mum is pointing at said nipple and wearing an expression of utter outrage, eyes bugged, jaw on the floor. She climbs off of her bed and comes close enough to almost touch the stubby stainless steel barbell pushed through the dark brown flesh of his areola; she probably would touch it if Mako didn’t, at the last second, bring a hand up to protect himself. 

“It’s been, what, fifteen years?” Mako snorts. “You don’t remember that time we had brunch at Floriditas and I kept making faces and going to the bathroom and you thought I was mad at you or like, hungover or something?”

“Oh, yeah…” Mum’s face glazes over with recognition.

“I wasn’t mad at you. I just had a tiny piece of metal in my nipple and it was killing me.”

“Why the hell would you do that to yourself?” Laying her hand over Mako’s on his chest, Mum gazes with pleading, kind of mournful eyes directly into the depths of his soul. “Why would you desecrate your body that way? Your situation is already tragic enough with all the goddamn tattoos, except for this one on your back, this one’s a nice, Māori sun–”

“Oh my God, I’d rather go talk to the roach,” Mako says, and then he does – roams back out into the living room with his hands cupping his private parts and an eye out for their very special home intruder. When he doesn’t find any other living thing aside from himself after two and a half minutes of careful, anxious searching, he closes the front door and calls out, “Coast is clear!” Then it’s back to bed, back to the toasty night sky, back to the illusion of privacy that comes with family life.

Mum renovates her garden for the coming spring over the course of the next week. From Home Depot, she procures spring plants and their seeds, two great bags of Miracle-Gro, Sta-Green Weed and Feed fertilizer, Ultragreen Vitamin and Hormone, new gardening gloves, a stainless steel hand spade with a bamboo handle, a red plastic watering can, trimming shears, and three additional pots for any future transplanting that may or may not occur. Periodically, Mako will head outside to smoke a cigarette or offer his mother a glass of water or simply watch her at her work – pouring soil and handling transplants and applying fertilizer with the strongest and gentlest of hands – and at 12:24 PM on the last day in January, when he sits on the sofa drinking pineapple-mango juice and watching some inane American television program with Kory and Mum comes back in the house sweat-drenched and soil-streaked, he gazes upon her perspiring, heavyset form and asks her, “Are you happy?”

Mum shoots him a look as if he’s asked her the stupidest question in the world. “I’m on menopause and chemotherapy drugs. I’m never happy.” Waddling in the direction of the bathroom: “I feel like my _back_ is about to _literally_ _break_ in _half_.” Gone, completely out of sight: “I’m so hot, my hot flashes are having hot flashes.”

“Oh, how Jesus fucking wept,” Mako utters under his breath, pointedly directing the words at the television rather than at his mother. Kory looks at him, bug-eyed and slack-jawed.

“You said a bad word,” she remarks in a quiet tone that mocks naïveté.

“I know, baby,” Mako replies. He hooks an arm around her fleshy shoulders and pulls her to him to kiss the side of her head, to blow a small raspberry into the skin of her cheek. “Don’t tell Nana.”

“Don’t tell Nana,” Kory echoes in a giggle, flopping down over his lap with her eyes on the TV.

Later, after the sun has begun its slow afternoon descent down the clear blue ladder of the sky and the halfway pleasant 62 Fahrenheit has settled into a marginally unbearable 44, Mako steps outside for his third cigarette of the day and observes the result of his mother’s hard work: the alstroemerias and the canna lilies skirting the back fence and communing joyfully with the bromeliads; the agave and devil’s ivy stationed in the central planter and so pretty and green and effusive; the sleeping patch of moist soil in which the arugula and beets are likely planted; the entire tableau enlivening the unfortunate gray courtyard with color, with organic existence. This is Mum’s act of consecration in the wake of her retirement and the move to New Orleans – her Type A project in her ill-fitting Type B life, the one she asked for as a reward for winning her first go-round with cancer. Mako feels, watching the flora and sucking curling tendrils of gray into his lungs until he tingles joyfully on the inside and his head begs to ache, as if he is one of those transplanted and overworked plants, held and carried and buried in dirt by his mother in the instance their renewal of a shared domestic state. He goes back inside to cook dinner (which is fussed over by Mum), sit with Kory and Jem in front of the tube (while Mum hangs out nearby, reading a book), take a shower (until Mum yells up the stairs that he’s wasting all the hot water), and go to bed (with Mum’s voice ringing in his ears, her hands phantom pressures on his shoulders, her plants talking to him).

With February’s increased warmth comes the arrival of ants. In the garden, Mum finds their mounds growing in size around her planters, the ants themselves tiny black pinpricks crawling on the candy-colored petals of her bromeliads and the thick, budding leaves of her arugula. She does a Nana Victoria and heats water on the stove, takes the pot nearly boiling over outside, and pours it into the ant piles before following the searing torrent with Pine-Sol. On the first Saturday in February, Mako watches Mum do this from one of the patio chairs, smoking and holding Kory back by her wrist so that the girl doesn’t go running directly into a) ants, or b) scalding water.

“Have you ever seen one of those videos where they pour, I think, molten aluminum into an anthill?” Mako asks, ashing his cigarette in the glass tray on the ground by his bare feet. Mum stands with her hands on her wide, bovine hips, bottle of Pine-Sol cradled beneath her left armpit.

“Why would they do that?” she asks. “To kill the ants?”

“No. They let the metal cool and it like, casts a mold of the inside of the anthill.” When Kory jumps up and down, impatient, Mako pulls her to stand between his legs and hugs her to his body, putting his face against her soft, squishy side. “You can see all the tunnels and cavities and everything.”

“But the ants die, right?”

“No, they’re forged in metal and thus made stronger.” Mako kisses Kory’s puppy belly with a  _ smack _ and then releases her, watches her scurry down the patio steps to go stand near the very edge of the steaming, amberish puddle growing around the now muddy anthills. “Of course they die, Mum.”

“That tongue, that tongue.” Mum shakes a reprimanding finger in Mako’s direction. “I should’ve cut it out when you were a baby. Then I wouldn’t have had to deal with a lifetime of you sassing me off.”

“Yeah, because you’d be in jail for child abuse.” Mako throws his head back and, despite the conversation’s very real proximity to his trauma, laughs into the foggy winter air, his body sprawled back against his chair’s multicolored nylon straps. 

Mum cuts her eyes at him, obviously trying not to smile. “You laugh,” she says. “But think about your life as it would have been had you been raised by your father alone.”

Abruptly, Mako’s laughter is stilled and then intensified in his throat. Being reminded of Ezra’s existence without warning is enough to both embarrass him and tickle him past pink all the way into red. “Oh my  _ God _ , I hate you.”

“‘ _ I hate you _ ,’ he says. To the woman who bore him in her womb and gave him life.” Mum makes a low, huffing noise, grabs the bottle of Pine-Sol from beneath her arm and waves it like a squat, cylindrical dagger in Mako’s direction. “Look at you! A  _ man _ , almost forty years-old! That’s my doing, you know! I brought you into this world!”

“Kory, please don’t step in that water! You’re almost fifteen, what’s wrong with you?” Mako sticks his cigarette in his mouth while staring Mum down, trading with her merry, amused glances. Blowing smoke, he asks, “Is there anything I can do for you so that you never say anything like that ever again?”

Mum crosses her arms over the broad swell of her chest, over the red Rolling Stones lips and tongue screen-printed onto her sweatshirt. Behind her, Kory touches the very tip of her toe to the small, shallow sea on the concrete. Mako folds one leg across the other, his left foot on his right thigh and his free hand picking idly at the callus on his big toe, the skin toughened from years of living like a country bumpkin and walking around barefoot outdoors. The sky is the purplish color of blueberry yogurt in the late afternoon, the sun sinking overhead and casting everything within in its halo in a clear white tint. Several doors down, someone is playing salsa music loud enough to be heard throughout the entire block if one stands outside.

“Help me pick my beets,” Mum says, finally. “I think they’re ready for that salad I wanted to make.”

Mako rips a strip of rough skin off of the pad of his toe and says, “Okay.” He tucks his cigarette into the side of his mouth. “Just let me finish this cig.”

Mum rolls her eyes and shakes her head, turning away towards her garden. “Ghastly habit.”

Mako lowers his voice so as to be only barely perceptible. “Bitch.”

Immediately, Mum whirls back around to face him, yelling, “ _ Huh?! _ ”

Instead of answering, Mako just cackles into the blueberry yogurt sky and grinds his cigarette out in his ashtray. He remembers a time when he wanted to be his mother’s friend.

He remembers Raukokore Sundays. Invariably, they began at seven o’clock in the morning. While Nana Victoria spent the day milking the goats and tending to the sheep and climbing on top of the house to patch and repatch the stubbornly problematic hole in the roof, Mako would be shanghaied into cleaning the interior with Mum – the house some great, mostly still animal that fed on dirt and shoes and people and rainwater and left all of these things lying, encrusted, dripping, and stained everywhere, over everything. As Mako tried not to trip over the vacuum cleaner’s twisted cord while he wiped down the photographs with a Windexy cloth, or crouched on the kitchen floor and scrubbed the tile around Mum’s feet while she washed every dish in the house, Mum bitched without stopping from the hours of 7:30 AM to around 2:00 AM, by which time she had drank enough whiskey to have her nice and friendly and just as liable to call her supervisor a “daft cunt” and Mako a “lazy, godforsaken piece of shit” as she had been all morning long, just in a much nicer tone of voice. This incessant, vitriolic chatter was Mum’s therapy. In lieu of obtaining professional help – the process of which would have made living two hours from actual civilization more difficult and more irrelevant than it was already – she would verbally exorcise all of her personal demons (which had tremendous longevity) and every smidgen of grime within the house at the end of each week, thus approximating her own sanity and ruining the weekend for everyone involved (that is: Mako and Mako alone).

“Can’t believe Americans,” she’d say every Sunday. “They think just because they make the best music and know how to rig international elections that they own the bloody world. Remind me never to set foot in that despicable, modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah ever in my life, boy. And don’t hold that statuette with one hand! If you break it, I’ll wring your motherfucking neck!”

“Do you want to hear what your grandmother said to me?” This, while she scrubbed the week’s worth of filth out of the bathtub and Mako did the same with the sink. “She said I have an anger problem. Do you think I’m angry? Don’t you  _ dare _ say yes, I’ll knock your skinny arse through the goddamn wall! I say, I don’t have an anger problem, I have a  _ the world is fucked up  _ problem. I have a  _ stupid fucking people _ problem. If I’m angry it’s because I’m damn well provoked to anger – it’s completely justified, righteous anger.  _ God _ , I hate these brushes! The bristles aren’t bloody fucking abrasive enough!”

“I swear to God, I don’t understand you and that goddamn video game.” This, while they swept and pressure-washed the patio together. “The video game, the books, the drawing – any of it. I mean, I read a lot when I was your age, and the teachers always called me artistic or whatever the fuck, but I wasn’t such a  _ zombie _ , Mako. There are other things in the world and I don’t understand why you can’t just tune in to them. It’s just opening your goddamn eyes and ears every once in a while. Watch where you point that bloody hose, eh?! This is what I’m fucking talking about – you have no attention span! I don’t even know why I even ask you to help me at all!”

Today, she says nothing while passing him beets that he inspects briefly for ants and ant bites before placing them within a deep ceramic bowl. Mum pulls the roots out of the ground and repeatedly pushes her silver hair out of her face, groaning when she has to dig deep to get at the more stubborn bulbs. Kory complicates the whole ordeal slightly – throwing her arms around Mako’s waist from behind and lolling her whole thick body from side to side, trying in vain to get him to rock and sway with her and whining when he remains an obstinate, upright monolith standing flat and still on the ground. Eventually, Mum picks the last beet, growls loudly, hands the root to Mako, and practically rips her hair off of her forehead, yanking it by the handful back over her scalp.

“I need to do like you,” she says, nodding upward at Mako, eyeing his signature headpiece. “Wear a bandana while I’m gardening.”

Mako smiles at her, ambiguous, then follows her into the house with Kory hanging onto his waist still. 

The lone love wolf of February comes to teach lessons about survival. Sticking it out, sticking together, afterschool special-style, blood red hearts in the eyes. KC reads Mako’s tarot for Valentine’s Day and he pulls the Nine of Swords, the Tower, and the Two of Cups – “Ouch,” she says to him, laughing darkly over the phone while he folds laundry in front of  _ Frasier _ . “At least the Two of Cups is a nice, juicy, sexy card.”

“I can jive with juicy and sexy,” Mako replies with a wry smile she can’t see. That night, leisurely working himself to a nice, juicy, sexy orgasm in the slow-rocking boat of Jem’s lap, he leans down to kiss Jem’s eyelids with the utmost tenderness.

“Happy Lupercalia?” Jem asks on the edge of a moan. Mako grins.

“Fuck off, you nerd,” he says, then laughs loud like a child when Jem turns him over onto his back, pressing him down into the mattress and kissing him everywhere, all over his tired and lonely skin.

The streets flood with rainwater and booze. There is music in New Orleans all year round, to be sure, but by the middle of the month, the volume has intensified to near-deafening levels and woken the asphalt demons in the middle of the night, opened up nice and ugly Mardi Gras potholes that rip the Jetta’s front left tire to shreds and send Mako’s blood pressure soaring through the roof. The holiday makes it entirely acceptable to drink before noon. Three days in a row, Mako comes home from work to find Mum buzzed out on Crown Royal, stuffing sheets into the dryer, singing The Beach Boys. He asks her if she’s okay on the third day; she looks at him oddly and says, “Why wouldn’t I be?” though she is vomiting liquid half an hour later and she doesn’t eat any of her dinner. It’s the chemo, Mako tells himself. “It’s the chemo,” he tells Kory. “It’s the chemo,” Jem tells him, and he kisses the word off the other’s lips as if it is succulent jam instead of putrid, pure fucking toxic waste. He saves Mum’s plate in the fridge in case her appetite rears its long lost head in the middle of the night. He skips lunch to shop for birthday presents, to buy Kory some prettified YA novel with a generically sexy white guy on the cover and a crushed velvet slip dress he knows he would like her in but is less sure she will actually want to wear; Mum a shiny new moleskin so she can stop writing of all her weird aging genius notes on sad scraps of paper that she scavenges from his office. He dreams – of black dogs chewing happily on the grapefruit folds of his brain; of his mother in bell-bottoms, riding a penny-farthing through Raukokore. Thinking it droll, Mum magnets the X-ray of her right breast to the refrigerator in the manner of a baby ultrasound. This is a fight that lasts for a week and a half and ultimately culminates in the picture’s continued existence on the freezer door, because Mum is always right, even when she’s so wrong she offends. Out of pure frustration and First World boredom, Mako cuts his hair over the upstairs bathroom sink in the middle of the night on a Friday/Saturday. He shears too close to the skull on the left side of his head and ends up with a punk rock, faux-hawk sort of thing that makes him look like the homeless kids with carabiners in their ears and cardboard signs, panhandling in front of the Walgreens and on every neutral ground in the city. Jem asks him if he wants to get married in New Zealand and he says, “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.” He misses Tatum Wharehari and calls to tell her this at 4:00 PM, Wellington time. She doesn’t answer. He goes to bed. He drinks more coffee. Getting up in the morning has become so difficult. Being, as he is, an idiot, and having been one his whole life, he finds it very easy to do nothing and go nowhere. He eats the last of the Valentine’s Day sea salt-infused Ghirardelli chocolate in the dark. He stands in the garden and watches the plants grow in triple-time. He waits for something to happen, and he is stupid – impossibly, horrifically stupid. On the last Thursday of the month, he chaperones Kory and two of her ballet friends at Muses and tolerates being called Kory’s “hot dad” in so-called whispered tones all through the evening by Deniz and Parisa. After driving the girls back home, he buys a strawberry daiquiri the size of his head from the drive-thru on Elysian Fields Avenue. He lets Kory have her first real taste of alcohol, “Because you’re almost fifteen and I love you so very much, my fish.”

“I love you too, Daddy,” she says with a bright red mouth. She will never not be the sweetest thing in his life.

Two days later, it is Saturday morning, the first day of March. Mako is working on his fourth restless hour of sleep when Mum materializes at his bedside and begins poking him hard with her Olympic-level strong pointer finger.

“What?” he groans into his pillow once he realizes that his visitor isn’t Kory, reasoning that there’s no earthly way she could hold that much vigor in any one of her fourteen year old fingers, nor is it the Devil rousing him to greet the morning in bizarre 87-degree hell.

“I need you to get up right now,” Mum’s voice tells him. Here there is another poke, right into the naked place between his sixth and seventh rib. “I need you to take me to the hospital. My appointment is at nine.” Another poke, this time into the fleshiness of his left bicep. “If you get up right now, I will make you breakfast. Eggs. Home fries. I’ll even peel an orange for you, and you know how I hate peeling oranges.”

“What time is it?”

“Seven-oh-five.”

“Jesus bloody  _ Christ _ , Mum…” Mako starts to turn away from his mother, to bury himself stomach-first further in his sheets, his pillows, his mattress, but then Mum is climbing into bed with him and forcibly flipping him onto his back with her strange demigoddess strength, digging her fingers into his shoulders and shaking him by them. Here come the PTSD flashbacks to his childhood, of Sunday mornings, of Monday mornings – of every type of morning except Thursday mornings, because apparently Thursdays were the magical, mystical days during which Mum couldn’t be arsed to be quite as fucking apeshit as she normally was.

“It’s Saturday morning!” Mum is leaning all two-hundred and sixteen pounds of her hefty, cetacean weight into his chest and stomach, determined to wake him – if not with traditional methods – through sheer bodily distress caused by lack of oxygen. “I’m offering you breakfast! I want to see the whites of your eyeballs in the next five seconds!”

“Or what?” Mako manages to ask with his eyes still firmly closed, knowingly chancing various forms of death and bloodshed and, in his not-quite wakefulness, not really caring for the time being. Meanwhile, Jem snores on beside him, blissfully unaware and pretty much dead to the world.

Mum presses her hands hard into his chest. “Or I won’t speak to you for the next week.”

“Shoot, wouldn’t that be a tragedy.”

“Five.”

Mako contemplates the bliss he’s bringing upon himself – the bliss of continued Saturday morning sleep, of not having to listen to his good mother’s voice for seven days.

“Four.”

He preemptively congratulates himself for making this decision, one so beneficial for his wellbeing, so purely self-loving.

“Three.”

He recalls the icy week from his thirteenth year – all the rejoicing, all the tears.

“Two.”

He recalls last weekend, when Mum came home so wiped from chemo she slept for hours afterward.

“On–”

Mako opens his eyes at the last possible moment, stretching their lids upward as high and as hard as possible. Mum is hovering over him, her hair so frizzy and so like his. 

“Hello!” he says.

“Hello.” Mum pats his face twice, knees her way backward off the bed, turns her back on him, and heads for the door. “Breakfast will be ready in thirty. I expect you to be downstairs and dressed by then.”

Mako gazes after her retreating form, then inspects the bumps and blips in the otherwise nondescript white ceiling. He eats his breakfast with Mum, her watching him feed on orange slices and tongue the translucent tart juice off of his fingers. They write a note on the dry erase board on the freezer –  _ Out 4 chemo, back home soon _ – then pile into the Jetta in their T-shirts and summer pants, the day so unseasonably hot for no fucking reason at all.

Mum screws the air conditioner all the way up to  _ 6 _ . “I can’t take this,” she says. She runs a hand backward through her hair, and Mako can only stare as a clump of silver comes out tangled around her fingers.

“Goddamn,” he intones.

“ _ Pfff _ .” Mum wads the hair up and tosses it out of her open window. “It’s just hair. You’ve been through this before.”

“I know, it’s just–” Mako stares straight ahead with pointed, affected interest as they pass the mustard yellow BARGAIN CENTER, the triad of trendy white women sashaying down the street. He clears the nonexistent phlegm from his throat. “Unsettling.”

“Yeah? Well you better settle right back down.” Mum rolls her window up and releases a gale-force sigh, leaning back in her seat and closing her eyes against the intensifying onslaught of the AC. “I won’t deal with your nerves today.”

He doesn’t know why he expected anything different. Mako pretends he doesn’t want to scream until he doesn’t have to anymore.

At this point in the history of medical care and cancer treatment, chemotherapy is an occasion for comfort and modern, sedentary enjoyment. It is administered in “lounges” outfitted with plush recliners and televisions broadcasting such soothing daytime programs as  _ Days of Our Lives _ and  _ General Hospital _ . The patient is expected to consume as many popsicles as possible within a two-hour period and to wear infantilizing mittens on the hands and frankly ridiculous wine-cooling accessories on the feet. Mako hates every part of it; the cloying softness of it; the way it is all carefully and intentionally orchestrated to protect his and Mum’s oh so delicate feelings and sensibilities; its up-to-date here-and-nowness. He plays Words With Friends with Gloria on his phone while Mum fumbles around with the television remote, trying to change the channel. 

“I can’t press the buttons, Mako,” she complains about a minute and a half into her struggle. He’s been waiting for her to say something, knowing that if he’d been the one to broach the subject, he’d have gotten a sound tongue-lashing and would have promptly lost the will to live. Sitting up in his BarcaLounger, he takes the remote from her.

“What channel do you want?”

“Find  _ Investigation Discovery _ for me. You know how I love a grisly murder.”

“The grislier the better.” Mako scrolls up the channel lineup with an eye out for desaturated interviews with white men and stripes of yellow CAUTION tape. Gloria plays JUICES for twenty-two points.

For a while, he and Mum simply sit in half-comfortable silence. Mako watches the slow IV drip, watches Mum pull idly at her hair and deposit the loose strands in sad little clusters on her armrest, watches her suck on a grape-flavored popsicle with her eyes glued with almost unnatural stillness to the television screen, watches the boring window scene: a subroof and the uninspiring parking lot beyond. Eventually a nurse – Reta with an E, as her nametag so proudly displays – pops her head into their curtained suite. 

“How you doin’, Miss Nuhgata?” she asks, butchering the pronunciation as most Americans (most Pākehās, actually) do.

“I’m fine, thank you,” Mum replies, mouth dark and tinged all over with purple.

“No mouth sores?”

Mum shakes her head and puts on the polite, easy smile she uses on strangers and acquaintances. “Nope.”

“Good!” Reta disappears. Mako decides he wants a popsicle. 

“Hand me that blue one,” he says, indicating with an outstretched finger the small cooler by Mum’s elevated feet. She looks at him as she has looked at him all his life: as if he is the strangest, most ridiculous alien child she has ever seen.

“You ate breakfast,” she says, but hands him the blueberry ice pop anyway. 

“A popsicle doesn’t count as food, Mum.” After peeling the transparent plastic sleeve off of the frosted treat, he uses one hand to hold the thing in his mouth and the other to thumb at his phone’s touchscreen. He plays QIS for a whopping ninety-six points and releases, in his head, the most maniacal and downright evil peal of laughter. “You didn’t eat anything.”

“I have no appetite, Mako,” she replies in the same tone he just used on her. “I’m not going to eat just to make you feel better.”

“Well, okay then. Fine. I’m not asking for you to fight with me, Christ.”

“I’m not fighting with you.”

“She says, jumping so far down my throat she’s coming out of my asshole.”

Mum’s hand comes over and whacks him not hard, but with considerable firmness, in the face. At this moment, Mako wants to be friends with his mother so badly he might cry. She, as his progenitor and serial emotional abuser of nearly forty years, has never been and never will be his friend. This makes him want to cry as well, but instead, he sucks on his popsicle and says, “Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me. I just hit you.”

“Glad to see you’re acknowledging it.”

“Don’t fucking start today.” Mum hands him the remote again and groans, “God, I’m so  _ bored _ . I hate doing this every weekend.”

“This is your last session, right?” Feeling daring, Mako bites off a bit of frozen blue ice and rejoices when the act doesn’t send arctic shockwaves of pain singing through his teeth. He starts scrolling through the channels again. “Remember that week when we didn’t have cable and all we did was watch YouTube videos about fat people?”

“Ooh, find  _ My 600-lb Life _ .” Mum reaches for Mako’s left bicep and pinches it as tightly as she can while wearing pink wool mittens. “They’re not fat people, Mako, they’re morbidly obese. They’re beyond fat.  _ I’m _ fat.”

“Big-boned.”

“That’s just a polite euphemism for fat.”

Mako stops scrolling at TLC. It’s not  _ My 600-lb Life _ , but  _ Say Yes to the Dress _ will have to do. Gloria plays AGATE for fourteen points. 

“You need to go get Kora’s birthday cake today,” Mum says, slurping purple juice off of her shrinking ice pop. Mako doesn’t know why, but he has always associated darkness with people who willingly elect to eat grape-flavored popsicles – a sort of unseen shadow about their person in his eyes, a heaviness, a complexity. Tatum used to love grape ice pops. He still hasn’t managed to get in touch with her.

“I was gonna get it tomorrow morning, so it’s super fresh for her.” He makes a face at the sort of appalling wedding dress being modeled by the bride-to-be on television: a strapless mermaid with what looks like great pieces of torn, off-white cardboard flaring out as the skirt; as an aside, he mutters, “Lord.” Then, biting off another ultramarine popsicle shard: “I can’t believe she’s going to be fifteen.”

“I remember when you were fifteen.” Mum sucks the last of her popsicle off of its wooden stick and into her mouth and speaks with it pillowed in the center of her tongue, lips parted, her intonation all wet and distorted. “You were a freakin’ astronaut, my love. A space cadet. Sometimes I think back to that summer, when you would lie out in the yard with damn near no clothes on and sleep with the lambs instead of going to school.”

“Hated school.”

“Everyone hates school.” Mum swallows her popsicle, then reaches into the cooler for another one – a cherry. “ _ I  _ hated school.”

It is as if a wall has collapsed on top of Mako. He looks at his mother with inflated eyes, his mouth ajar and the ice pop only remaining within it through the efforts of his right hand. “I call bullshit,” he says. 

“Oh, so just because I was good at school and had a major job at a university for decades means I  _ liked _ it?” Mum shakes her head and nips the rounded tip off of her fresh cherry treat. “You couldn’t fathom my capacity for enduring that which I do not enjoy. I liked learning. I liked the toil and the hard work that went into the expansion of my mind. I liked the intensity and the fruitfulness of the grind.”

“All I’m hearing is that you liked school,” Mako says. 

“School is a social, bureaucratic institution just as much as it is place of learning,” Mum retorts. “Those aspects, I could never deal with.”

“I feel like no matter what happens for the rest of my life, I’m always going to be deliriously happy about you beating the shit out of Dr. Kauffman.”

“I didn’t ‘ _ beat the shit out of _ ’ Dr. Kauffman.” Even saying this, Mum grins magenta, the edges of each tooth stained grotesquely with color. “I just put a bit of a scare into him.”

“You were two seconds and the dean away from walloping his arse into the next century,” Mako asserts.

“Shush.” There is Mum’s hand, rubbing soft coral wool over the koi fish swimming on the inside of his left elbow. “We don’t speak of this anymore.”

This was an incident that may go down forever in the Ngata clan book of life as one of the most iconic instances of violent familial love ever expressed; this was a manic episode of cosmic proportions, his mother calling out his painfully Pākehā lit professor for refusing to address him by his given Maori name and instead insisting on calling him the awful, awful corruption “Mack”; this was his mother grinding her boot heel into Kauffman’s leather-encrusted toes and shoving him by the shoulders into his stupid little file cabinet in his stupid little office; this was his mother almost getting fired in the aftermath, and him being so proud of her for it. 

In the wake of her hearing, from which she just barely emerged victorious on the grounds of racial sensitivity and her seniority over Kauffman, she took him back home to 50 Salamanca Road and put the ‘80s station on the radio while they drank rum and cokes a little heavy on the rum. At the time, he hadn’t been in his mother’s bedroom in years, much less on her balcony, where he used to sneak to smoke cigarettes when she was away from home for some academic luncheon or otherwise braising lamb downstairs in the kitchen, in the otherworld ushered in by cooking. He didn’t tell her this then; instead, he talked about the Bonnie Tyler song streaming through tinny speakers, the way he’d played it millions of times on Nana’s stereo when they lived in Raukokore. 

“No kidding, Mako.” Mum gave him a murmured “thanks” when he handed over the fresh cocktail she requested before his quick trip back inside the house. Her dark, then ebony-hued bangs rode up and blew back to expose her forehead with the chill autumn breeze – she had the tiniest of scars there, though not very many people had borne witness to it with it always being covered by her hair – and there was the beginning of a smile pulling at her mouth when she said, “I used to listen to that song all the time before you were born.”

“You’re joking.”

“No!” Her elbow came out to jab into Mako’s side as he settled his weight back against the balcony, half-consciously mirroring her position – ankles crossed, elbows propped against the stainless steel railing. Her body was warm and soft and motherly where it pressed close to his bare arm; her smile that rare, open, quietly glowing thing it nearly never became; and she was singing to him: “ _ Every now and then I know you’ll never be the boy you always wanted to be… _ ”

She didn’t know that he’d spent a good thirty seconds watching her through the glass door before he’d actually took it upon himself to rejoin her. As much time as they’d spent together in his life, he’d only just recently discovered the merits of gazing upon her when she wasn’t aware that he was looking – not in a creepy way, of course, but because when her presence was shared she built a hard, earthen crust around herself, shielding her softer parts and masking her vulnerabilities. When she was alone, though, the pieces of her came together to form one unbroken whole, and Mako has loved her always – he really and truly has – but he might have loved her more when she was fully submerged in the ocean of herself, alone and unafraid.

“ _ Every now and then I know you’ll always be the only boy who wanted me the way that I am… _ ”

Through the glass door, he’d watched her stare off down Salamanca, gaze emptily at the dying sunset with the bare bones of a smile decorating her face, and he’d wondered what she was so gently pleased about, marveled silently at the hair loosed from its usual bun that had touched her lower back and the grass that had sprouted on the back of her naked calves, the skin there unshaved for about a week and a half.

“ _ Every now and then I know there’s no one in the universe as magical and wondrous as you… _ ”

And minutes later, because he wanted to, he nudged his forehead and the bridge of his nose against her pale, unclothed shoulder in a silent and vague declaration of affection that was so wildly characteristic of him, Mum looked like she might actually laugh for a second or two. But she didn’t laugh.

She brought one thick arm around to drape across the back of his pretty brown shoulders and kept singing.

“ _ Every now and then I know there’s nothing any better, there’s nothing that I just wouldn’t do _ .”


	14. 14

#  _ 14 _

He used to collect sewing machines. In retrospect, he could have turned out just like his father: obsessive, esoteric, saddled with a bare bones existence that circumnavigated around some singular odd, mechanical subject that nobody with an actual life could even contemplate caring about. He used to collect sewing machines, until one day he woke up, twenty-six years old with a three year old child, an ex-fiancée, and a feature film and said, “I’m done with being this kind of weird.” He threw eight of his nine machines away, but kept the one he’d repurposed as a sculpture of a spider with only seven legs and just over thirty bejeweled eyes because Kory liked it – it was bubblegum pink and its many eyes were very pretty, by her estimation.

He lived with Jem at the time. He slept, after months of the futon and occasional bed-sharing with his best friend, in the spare bedroom with Kory at or on his side, stuck to him like a big brown suction cup. The sewing machine thing had started about three years before it ended, when he’d been coming right out of a bipolar II/autism spectrum disorder diagnosis and the spectacular breakdown that had led up to it, when all he’d really wanted – all he’d wanted his whole life, to be honest, but what he’d wanted then with a pronounced and sort of desperate urgency – was for things to make sense and fit together neatly. He’d never understood his father better than he had for the first three years of Kory’s life, when he’d owned, refurbished, or transformed between twenty-five and thirty sewing machines for his own personal pleasure.

Feed dogs were his favorite part. Kory’s too – they both liked the name. When Kory was two and they still lived with her mother as a family halfway trying to be conventional, not really wanting it, she’d sit in his lap while he worked at the big wooden table in his studio, pulling shit apart and indoctrinating her in the beauty of deconstruction.

“These,” he said, holding up the tiny, jagged bits of metal he’d removed from his Husqvarna 3600. “Are the feed dogs.”

“Feedogs,” Kory echoed. He let her hold them, and she made them bounce a little in the air, her making soft barking noises. “ _ Woof woof _ .”

“Yeah,” he laughed, moving on to extract the circular bobbin from the wreckage. “ _ Woof woof _ .”

This morning, approximately thirteen years later, he texts Jem while sitting in the Jetta on the corner of Dauphine and Independence, five blocks down from home on Louisa and across the street from Bywater Bakery.

#    
  


**Today** 8:47 AM

**mako gehringer  
** hey can we start a band called the feed dogs

**jeremiah tui  
** FUCK WOW I love that. I actually love that so much

Are we going to import such kiwi talents as Tatum and Quick or are we going to crowdsource New Orleans musicians?

**mako gehringer  
** omg you’re serious

**jeremiah tui  
** Hell yeah I’m serious were you not?

**mako gehringer  
** i was lowkey kidding. like adding to our list of cool band names

but shit mate if you really want to do that maybe we actually can when things like. calm down a little bit

aw shit now i’m like thinking myself out of it like. i have a child and a 9-5 job and friends and a NEUROCHEMICAL IMBALANCE THAT CAUSES ME CRUSHING DAILY PAIN

**jeremiah tui  
** Baby

Listen

There will literally always be time for anything you want to do. Anything WE want to do. We will make time and we will be happy and we will do things on weekends and eat refreshing fruits for energy

And you will take your medicine and see China

And remember that I also have a job. Not a super economical job but a job nonetheless

You can cut back at work a little

We can ask Kory to join the band! Be a family band fuck how cute would that be!

**mako gehringer  
** i just had a transcendent vision of quitting at endymion and starting a career of making music with you and writing children’s books

which would be great if i didn’t have like. an actual life now

maybe when we’re in our fifties 

**jeremiah tui  
** I still think we should do the band thing

Can we talk about it more tonight?

**mako gehringer  
** of course <3

#    
  


By now, Mako has made his way into the bright red bakery and begun to peruse the glass cases full of cakes, pastries, and other confectioneries: pretty pink petit-fours, lemon and chocolate Chantilly cakes, glass cups of crème brûlée, three-dollar cannolis, profiteroles glazed over smooth with ganache, pies filled with apples and blueberries and raspberries, a chocolate butter pecan cake frosted with swirling white icing, fritters the size of his hands, vegan carrot cakes, elegant mille-feuille, laminated Danishes flavored with baker’s cheese and cherries, strawberry kolaches. Being that Mardi Gras is in two days, there are king cakes in all flavors set out, frosted with drippy white icing and heavily dusted with sprinkles of almost luminescent purple, green, and gold. Painted across the top of each display case are the words in smooth blue cursive:  _ a little bit of bliss in every bite _ . Behind the counter, a Black woman with dreadlocks piled on top of her head and a meticulously shaved undercut putters around, wiping down the counter by the register with a striped yellow cloth. Mako shoves his phone into his back pocket after having stood so uselessly before the counter for the better part of three minutes, says, “Sorry about that.”

“Oh no, you’re fine,” the clerk replies. She adjusts the rack of chocolate chip and peanut butter cookies facing outward on the counter, turning them so that they are slightly askew from a customer’s point of view. “You’re fine. It’s been a slow morning anyway.”

“That’s kind of weird, eh? Considering it’s Mardi Gras.”

“Stranger things have happened in New Orleans.” The clerk shows him a brilliant, kind of breathtaking smile, then tucks her towel into the waistband of her acid-washed jeans. “I haven’t seen you in here before.”

“That’s because I promised my partner I wouldn’t buy any baked goods except for in the event of a birthday or preapproved holiday,” Mako concedes with the barest hint of a smirk. “Today’s my daughter’s birthday, so for the next, uh–” He glances at his watch. “Fifteen hours, my presence here is totally legal.”

At this, the clerk produces a low giggle, eyes crinkling cutely at the corners and teeth almost brilliantly white when set against the splendid darkness of her skin and lips. “How old is she?”

“Fifteen. She’s made of magic and I’ve been ensorcelled to do her bidding for the day.”

“‘ _ Ensorcelled _ ’, huh?”

“Sorry.” Mako’s mouth pulls out sideways in both directions until his lips are taut and thin. “I’m a writer, it just fucking… comes out sometimes.”

“Don’t worry about it, dude.” The clerk’s hands come to rest palms down against the countertop. “Is there anything I can get for you?”

Mako gets a cream cheese king cake and two café au laits to go. He bows deeply before the clerk before heading back out to his car, carefully balancing his cup holder atop the king cake box all the while. 

When he gets home, Jem answers the door for him, still in Mako’s robe from the women’s department and loose baseball-striped boxers that kind of (kind of) show off the outline of Jem’s dick. 

“What flavor did you get?” Jem’s eyes follow him into the dining room, blatantly caressing his shoulders hugged by an old T-shirt from Karekare, his ass similarly hugged by his favorite pair of denim joggers. Apparently emboldened by the one question, Jem swiftly follows it up with two more: “Is that coffee? Also, do you know what time the parade is tonight?”

“Hey, I’m not Google.” Mako puts the cake and java down on the dining table and turns to welcome Jem’s searching kiss, him being pulled into the other’s arms and against his favorite big, cuddly body. He  _ hmm _ s against Jem’s mouth. “The coffee’s for me and Kory. The cake is cream cheese.”

“Yum.” Jem squeezes and tugs at him until his heels come about an inch off the ground, both of them groaning at the same time with the effort. 

“I was gone for like ten minutes.” Mako releases a short, airy laugh, bringing a hand up to pet at the sleepy wildness of Jem’s curls. “You’re not this excited to see me.”

“I am.” Jem pushes his face into the juncture of Mako’s neck and shoulder and kisses there. His voice is low and muffled by warm skin when he asks, “Why didn’t you get me any coffee, eh? I’m not worthy of the great gods of java?”

“I wasn’t thinking, okay? Here.” Mako picks up his café au lait, the one he’d been sipping at on the car ride back home, and pushes it into Jem’s hand. “Drink mine. I’m going to get my little fairy out of bed.”

“I’m in love with you today, you know that?”

Making for the stairs, Mako glances over his shoulder and asks, “You’re not in love with me every day?”

“I am.” Jem takes a short drag from his coffee and adopts an utterly blissed out expression. “I woke up feeling the consistency of chocolate pudding today, though.”

“As opposed to your usual consistency, which is more like porridge.” 

“I don’t know what that means.”

Mako just waves a hand in the air, kisses the air in Jem’s direction, winks, then takes the stairs two at a time. 

Kory is buried in blankets that resemble cartoon seas, the thin blue quilt on top swimming with two-dimensional butterflyfish, chalk bass, royal gramma, and clownfish bobbing about and around flat green seaweed and pink and purple spreads of coral. Her electric fan is whirring at full throttle; her curtains drawn against the 9:00 AM sunlight; her phone plugged into the wall and resting on the squat wooden table next to her bed; and Love the gigantic stuffed unicorn face-down on the hardwood, likely having fallen out of bed in the middle of the night. Mako enters the space quietly, half-tiptoeing across the floor and making his breath as soft and shallow as can be; he abandons the practice entirely once he reaches Kory’s bed, though, upon which he flings himself onto the mattress and heaves Kory into his arms to kiss, to hold, to nuzzle his face into the top of her head and say, “Good morning, my fifteen year old fish girl! The sun is shining, the day is new, and the Earth says hello to you!”

“Daddy…” Kory groans, instinctively stretching her arms and legs outward in a futile attempt to free herself from his grip. She turns inward into his chest, long hair strewn in all directions, hands pushing feebly into his stomach through her blankets. Her dulcet murmur: “I’m asleep.”

“How can you be asleep on a day like this?” Mako fingers the dark mocha tresses out of Kory’s lovely, round, heart-shaped face – her face that he so adores, her face that is the union of all the good things he used to have in his life. “Also, how can you sleep like this? I swear to God, it’s like snoozing in Hell, you stuck under all these damn blankets.”

In reply, Kory just makes a long, ambiguous noise in the back of her throat. For several moments, she does not move or speak, simply lies thick in Mako’s arms with her face nuzzled into his sternum and her eyes fluttering a little beneath their lids. Mako is content to lie like this for the rest of the morning – he only got five hours of sleep last night, which is kind of great compared to his track record for the past three months or so but still represents a thoroughly inadequate amount of rest, and he can’t remember the last time he had Kory unawake and completely, adorably vulnerable in his arms, the delightfulness of this, her heartbeat through her high school gym T-shirt, the cerulean polish chipping off of her nails – but then Kory’s face screws up and she’s blinking her pale eyes open, looking up into his face like it’s the first day of her life. She releases a breath through her mouth, and he smells its sleepy staleness, loves it for this.

“I got you coffee and king cake,” he whispers. Her eyes go wide and bright.

“Is the cake cream cheese?”

“Of course, babydoll.”

“And the coffee?”

“Café au lait. I’ve got you covered.”

Kory’s mouth pulls wide across her face, coaxing her precious dimples into view and successfully transforming Mako into blood and flesh purée. Digging herself partially out of her cotton blend cocoon, she wraps her arms around her father’s middle and puts her cheek to the steady beat of his heart. “Let me paint your nails tonight,” she says.

“Okay,” Mako replies into her noggin.

“I love you,” she says.

“Happy birthday, fish,” he replies. He kisses her hairline. “I love you, too.”

He doesn’t know how he ended up with such a good kid.

His first machine was a classic Singer 222k Featherweight from 1954 – all sleek black lines and sparkly gold Art Deco accents, a contraption much sought after by quilters. He bought it amid the frenzy of Kory’s seventh month of life, when he sat her up on the couch and fed her macerated squash and pumpkin flesh with a tiny yellow spoon, when Aroha was still making an active effort to appear as though she cared about their shared life. 

“Are you going to make clothes with it?” Aroha asked him about the machine. It was around eight o’clock in the evening and Kory was drooping, consciousness faltering, sitting in Mako’s lap while he tried to feed himself leftover fried chicken, potato wedges, and tzatziki sauce (they ate so oddly in those days) with one hand and held her flush to his stomach with the other. Mako smeared a cayenne-seasoned hunk of potato in white dip, popped it into his mouth, and chewed for an annoyingly long time before answering.

“I don’t know.” He gazed down at Kory’s head, the swirl of thick, dark hair over her scalp. “I was thinking about pulling it apart and trying to put it back together from like, a book or something.”

“Why?” Aroha stood then in the kitchen, drinking a Parrotdog over the sink while she worked herself up to washing a dish or two. Her voice drifted sweetly into the living room, echoing faintly off of the kitchen floor and pressed metal ceilings. “Is that your new career? Sewing machine technician?”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Mako said. “I just want something to do besides look after this one.”

At this, Aroha appeared in the kitchen doorway, swinging her beer bottle from side to side by its pony neck and looking at him with her strange silvery eyes. “Oh, yes,” she said, then made a kind of ugly face at Kory – playful, yet indicative of so much hostility Mako had yet to fully comprehend. “Her, your full-time job.”

Mako dropped his head to kiss the top of Kory’s. She cooed a little, and his heart beat fast.

It wasn’t only her noises that sent him racing. Her looks did, too; her smile that he believed would kill him one day; the grasp of her little hand, squeezing his ring and pinkie finger; her wake-up calls when he napped with her on the couch, the small mouth suctioned to the tip of his nose.

From then on, after finishing up with breakfast in the mornings and making all kinds of ungodly expressions and sounds at the news, Mako spent hours in his studio, pushing his Singer along to total breakdown and having a number of intriguing conversations with Kory:

1.) “Sometimes I can’t believe what you’ve done to my girlfriend. I mean, she actually has  _ tits _ and  _ hips _ now, can you believe that? She had hips before, of course, but you like, stretched bone. Bone isn’t plastic. How did you stretch something that’s not plastic? Are you a magical baby? Is that what it is – you’re made of magic?” At this point, Mako would have put his tools down and gone over to blow raspberries against his daughter’s brown belly, pulling her hands and feet around in little circles and asking her, “Are you magic? Are you magic? Tell me, are you magic?”

Kory’s response: Naturally, she was overcome with a bout of uncontrollable laughter and commenced with the most jubilant wiggling one could have the pleasure of engaging in, and honestly, the sight of that alone made Mako feel a lot less stupid about singing silly nursery rhymes and blowing air on his infant daughter’s abdomen while also twenty-four years old, objectively cool as hell, and kind of a legend in the Wellington theatre scene.

2.) “Shit!” This, when Mako accidentally dug the pad of his thumb into the point of the Singer’s needle while ineptly trying to extract it, hard enough to draw carmine blood to the surface of his skin. “That’s what I get for being an amateur, isn’t it? You’re going to bleed a lot, too, you know. I swear, that’s creepy as hell of me to say, but it’s true. We bleed so much, mate, just trying new things, figuring stuff out. And you, of course, being a girl – you’ll bleed every month by the time you’re fifteen. That’s sounds about right, eh? Your mum told me she started her period when she was fourteen. That’s a weird thing to know about a person. Sometimes I think I know everything about your mum, but then she’ll surprise me. I think that’s loving someone, still being surprised by them.” By then, Mako had turned to Kory’s booster seat and showed her his weeping thumb, which he sucked on before uttering a quiet, “Ouch!”

Kory’s response: She reached a chubby hand out to grasp lightly at Mako’s nose, then let loose a raucous little laugh. Immediately, Mako was reminded of Aroha. He suspected it had something to do with the whole finding humor in his pain/general existence both she and her daughter seemed to have going on.

3.) “To tell you the truth, I have no idea what I’m doing. I hope you don’t grow up thinking that that’s what adulthood is about – knowing shit. I mean, we all know things. You can’t help but pick them up as you go through your life. Even the deaf and blind know things. But I’m just as confused as you, baby girl, and I’ve got a twenty-three year head start on you. How does it feel knowing your father’s a complete dolt? He loves you, though.” Quietly, as he split the shiny black shell of the Singer’s arm in two with a handheld circular saw: “More than anything in the world.”

Kory’s response: She blinked her big, pale eyes in his direction, alert but unalarmed by the shrill sound of mechanical whirring and a metal blade slicing into cast aluminum. Idly, the fingers of her right hand curled and uncurled in slow, rhythmic spasms; when all the noise died down, she pronounced “Shit!” into the newfound silence, and instantly Mako knew he and Aroha had to cut down with the swearing, if for no other reason than to prevent the outrage of future teachers and guidance counselors.

4.) “You have your mum’s eyes, you know.” This, murmured thoughtlessly as he carried her out of the room and into the lounge, where he would sprawl across the sofa with his crown propped against one armrest and feet dangling off the opposite, Kory with her fists and head and the whole gentle weight of her balanced carefully against Mako’s chest. It was only 11:37 in the morning and Mako had, in fact, consumed close to a whole pot of coffee not very many hours earlier, but he could already feel the exhaustion that had become a near-constant in those days creeping up on him, begging him to lie back and just breathe for awhile. With a sigh, he glanced down to peer at his daughter’s head – his favorite head, covered with thick, chocolate-dark hair – and added, marginally quieter, “Always nice to see a Maori with pale eyes. Don’t tell anyone I said that, though. They might take it the wrong way.”

Kory’s response: She dragged her fisted hand a few inches across Mako’s chest in her fast-approaching sleep, brought the appendage up to her face where she had her ear pressed against the place right above Mako’s beating heart. This was so arresting, it gave Mako chills.

In those days, he fucked up all the time. Things haven’t changed much since. The manner of blundering is different, of course – then, it was all baby shit smeared down his shirt and nappies put on inside out; dressing Kory for summer in winter because all her winter clothes were dirty; making a mess at dinnertime, apple/mango/carrot purée everywhere but in Kory’s mouth, on her bib and staining the couch and somehow dried in Mako’s hair when he and Aroha brushed their teeth before bed; making promises he couldn’t keep, like “Everything will be okay” and “I’ll always be here” – but the soul of each fuck-up remains the same, just as inconsequential and ridiculously devastating as the mistakes were in those earliest of times. Each time he’s made one, his soul has fragmented just a little. 

Today, he is in so many pieces. He copes by letting Kory spread wine-colored polish over his nails while Jem sprays his hair blue-green in the next room, Kory’s phone nestled in the audio dock and playing some song with the word “pussy” in it like five bajillion times. 

“This is inappropriate,” Mako says, laid out on his back on the bed while Kory sits cross-legged at his side and works on his right hand. Raising his voice so that Jem can hear him in the bathroom, he asks, “Are you hearing this, babe?”

“‘ _ Pussy pussy pussy marijuana _ ’?” Jem echoes. When he puts his head momentarily in the doorway, the top of it is a swirling teal flame and his expression is thick with bemusement. “That’s all I’m hearing, over and over again.”

“If it makes you feel better, I don’t sing along when I listen to this by myself,” Kory says with a sarcastic bent to her tone. An hour earlier, she polished her own nails a sort of dreamy shade of pearlescent blue; after she gets finished with Mako, she will move on to applying body glitter and deity-appropriate makeup to both her and her father’s faces for their costumes for tonight’s parade.

Now, Mako reaches over with his left hand to swat at Kory’s shoulder without actually hitting it. “Don’t tell me you hear worse than this out of me. I may have a sailor’s mouth but at least I’m not vulgar.”

“Isn’t that the literal definition of vulgar?” Kory asks.

“Technically, we’re all vulgar,” Jem pipes up in his infuriating and endearing matter-of-fact voice. “Vulgar just means relating to ordinary people’s language.”

“Semantics,” Mako says. “Vulgar also means just plain fucking obscene, like, poop and sex jokes kind of obscene – which I am not!”

“I feel like you’re wrong but I can’t remember a specific incident with which I can disprove what you just said,” Jem says.

“Ooh! Ooh! I have one!” Kory, so fucking beautiful on her birthday it’s disgusting, raises her face to the brightness of the ceiling light and grins as she dips her polish brush into its respective bottle. “Last month when he was talking about his coworker and said she was going to eat poop and die.”

Mako gives Kory a smile made of velvet and water vapor. “It’s so cute when you say it like that.”

Kory flutters her eyelashes at him. “It’s my job to be adorable. I pay taxes and everything.”

Leaning his head back against his pillow, Mako laughs into the wet, illuminated air. In the bathroom, Jem is laughing too, spraying his hair and giggling away.

They doll up for Bacchus. Sitting on the toilet, Mako closes his eyes and lets Kory decorate his face with too expensive eyeliner, insufficiently expensive mascara, body glitter that has sat patiently in the bathroom since last February, and lipstick the shade of fresh red grapes. Jem is his fifty-dollar Poseidon in a sequined blue bomber jacket Mako bought in some Magazine novelty shop two Mardi Gras ago and with Kory’s stuffed, two foot alligator tucked beneath one meaty arm; Kory an adolescent Artemis, wearing the crescent moon strung silver across her forehead and golden antlers atop her scalp, a ditzy moon-and-stars dress over tacky as hell Forever 21 gladiator sandals. Mako, he appears as the twenty-first century Greco-Roman god of wine himself in a faux-leopard fur coat and burgundy skinny jeans ripping themselves across the knees, a wreath of plastic grapes pinned haphazardly to his head and a ghetto gold tiger’s head pendant swinging against his sternum with every step. When they make their way down into the living room, parading one right after the other down the stairs, clinking all the while, Mum peers at their glitter-stained, color-popping, easy-on-the-eyes festivity over the top of her book and says, “Another year, another ridiculous set of costumes.”

“Nothing will beat the year we went to Nyx as a toothbrush, toothpaste, and tooth,” Jem remarks.

“I think we look pretty fucking good, eh?” Mako hooks an arm around Kory’s neck and pulls her giggling to him, closes an eye briefly when one of her antlers hits him in the face. He turns to Jem. “Should we pregame?” 

“‘ _ Pregame _ ’?” Mum asks before Jem can say anything.

“He means, should we drink before we go out,” Jem clarifies for the old woman’s sake.

“You guys are going out to eat afterwards, aren’t you?” Mum turns the television volume down so that _ Chopped _ isn’t yelling over everybody at the top of its cookingest lungs. “Just wait till you get to the restaurant to drink. Or even better – don’t drink at all! You know the streets will be hell.”

“I can’t go through this day without a drink.” Taking Kory’s hand and shaking it back and forth in the air until she laughs at his histrionics, Mako lets his glittery head loll wildly from side to side and his tongue flounder about between his grapey lips. “I can’t survive without my ethanol, my juice, my nasty bootleg moonshine hooch–” He quickly turns and heads into the kitchen. “I’m gonna have a glass of wine. Can I have a glass of wine?”

Jem watches Mako go and, when she reaches out for him, hooks his bluish index and middle fingers around Kory’s. “I guess this means I’m driving?”

Mako’s reply and the tone in which it is delivered is positively syrupy: “Sure, sweet bug.” He pours Barefoot Merlot into a Dollar Store cup until it nearly flows over the plastic lip. “Kory, my fish, come drink some of this wine with me so I don’t feel like such an asshole!”

Mum produces a high-pitched, police siren squeal as Kory comes skipping with thick thighs and a heavy tread into the kitchen, ready to drink wine out of her father’s cup and spend the evening walking down St. Charles Avenue, which they will, which they do. The 5:00 PM heavens are a cloud-covered quilt the oneiric color of Kory’s nail polish – milk-saturated periwinkle in some places, old maid mauve in others closer to the Victorian and plantation style houses and the towering oak trees that line the sky, which is always prettier in Uptown. They leave Jem’s Hyundai on the street right alongside Audubon Park and walk thirty blocks to the parade, striding down the neutral ground between the streetcar tracks, breathing the heavy humid air amid countless men dressed or otherwise colored the same as boiled crawfish, countless women with silicone in their chests and bikini tops on in the 70 degree afternoon, countless children carried atop their parents shoulders wearing feather boas and plastic masks, countless babies and puppy dogs toted around in Hasbro wagons and cheapo perambulators. The Krewe of Bacchus blasts bombastic, bass-heavy jazz music and ‘80s hits loud enough to shake the ground and wake the city and send father and daughter with their asses popping and their hands in the air into the thicket of people flooding the street, heckling for strings of cheap and environmentally devastating plastic beads, singing along to the deafening music, dancing until they can’t breathe and the air tastes metallic and boozy and cold. Mako holds Kory’s hand; she skips him around in circles as they sing, “ _ I’m… in… heeeaaven… with my boyfriend, my lovely boyfriend! _ ” 

“ _ There’s no beginning and there is no end! _ ” goes Kory.

“ _ Time isn’t present in my dimension! _ ” Mako sings back.

After the sun sets, they make their way back to the car.

“Man, you know what I just thought about?” Mako, drunk on the energy of the parade, ambles through the streetlit night with his arm threaded through Jem’s and watches Kory walk ahead of them – far out of his physical reach, but still sparkly in his sight. “How like, you never really can go back to the time when you were a kid and you were innocent and chaste and like, didn’t know about all the extraneous sexy and dark bullshit that makes up so much of our lives and the way we think as adults. Or, no – even better – when you discovered that sexy and dark bullshit and your whole world was just  _ rocked _ , like that shit was so revolutionary. Two weeks ago I was watching some stupid cartoon with Kory and none of the characters had nipples and it made me think about how, like, exciting nipples used to be for me? When I was a teenager? And now I’m just like, oh yeah, nipples, whatever. Nipples aren’t obscene body parts. They’re just nipples. Aren’t nipples the cornerstone of mammalian life? Shouldn’t we be celebrating nipples as like, evolutionary milestones and things of delicate yet profound beauty? If tomorrow I saw a woman walking topless down the street with her nips out I would fucking  _ yawn _ , Jeremiah. I would yawn. If I was a teenager, though, my dick would be so hard so fast, like – what happened to that time in my life? When I got excited about bodies and novelty and like, beauty? When hope was high and life worth living? What even was my life before fucking Tatum Wharerahi sent me Astroglide in the mail as literally the most friendly and mundane present ever instead of like, a direct come-on or a dare?” He turns to look at Jem, leans his head in close to the other’s blue, Neptunian swirls. “You know what I mean?”

“Can I just say that I love your stupid brain?” Jem grins, and it is so beautiful, so perfect on this fluorescent sensory cornucopia of a night, that Mako smacks a wet kiss against his cheek, leaving behind a magenta lip print and pulling Jem’s gap-toothed smile ever wider across his face. “I do. And I get what you mean. I feel like getting old is just getting progressively more bored with everything until you don’t give a shit about anything anymore and then you die.”

“That’s the first time I’ve heard the word ‘ _ die _ ’ without wanting to peel all my skin off with a butter knife in about four months,” Mako interjects kind of loudly, and he’s laughing, cackling with a sort of inappropriate, unsettling candor that Jem is not all that surprised or disturbed by. Jem keeps talking.

“At least we have each other to get bored with.” Hilariously, he yawns, then disentangles his and Mako’s arms in favor of slipping his around Mako’s body and tucking his hand in the other’s back left pocket. “I don’t think I’ll ever be bored by you, though.”

“Bro, that is so gay,” Mako says.

“I know, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Mako stops walking, waits for Jem’s body to still as well, and wraps himself around his thick protean love, rocking their torsos and hips together under the St. Charles canopy of oaks. “You’re everything.”

“You’re getting sleepy aren’t you?” A man on a bike rides past and Jem doesn’t pull away, doesn’t do anything but run his hands up beneath Mako’s coat to touch his palms to naked, sweaty back and hold the other as near as physically possible, saying, “You’re only sweet when you’re sleepy.”

“Shhh.” Mako walks backwards and pulls Jem along. “We’re losing Kory. Today is about her.”

Kory is sitting on the hood of the car when they arrive to it on Calhoun Street, her face haloed with light from her phone’s glowing blue screen.

“Don’t you ever walk out of my sight like that again,” Mako says with a sort of deceptive lightness to his tone. “You don’t know how damn scary this city is.” He wraps a hand around Kory’s left ankle and gives it a squeeze, leans in for a kiss and just gets the side of Kory’s head, her sucked vortexlike into the world that exists within Gorilla Glass and LCD display sensors. 

“You guys were taking too long,” Kory says, whiny. She grins into her fat iPhone touchscreen and, with a single-mindedness endemic to teenagers and manic-depressives, begins shooting off at the mouth at approximately sixty miles per hour: “Apparently Mr. Katz is between Jefferson Avenue and Josephine? Candela just texted me that she found him and his wife and he like, asked her about me? He’s dressed as Lady Gaga from 2008! That’s like, from before I was even born! That’s like vintage Gaga! That’s like–”

“Why is your social studies teacher asking about you?” Mako asks. There’s a moment immediately following the question’s opaque, uncomfortable expulsion into the air in which they’re all just awkwardly sitting/standing around in the street, Bacchus music booming half-audibly in the far distance, a gaggle of drunk women crossing Calhoun at its intersection with St. Charles and laughing at the top of their hyena lungs, the streetlights hanging amberly above. In a driveway several yards away, an opossum emerges from beneath the bottom of a dusty white sedan; Kory shrieks, and when Mako and Jem turn to see what she sees, they catch the opossum scurrying off into the darkness, all but actually saying, “I’m not here for this two-legged bullshit.”

Jem clears his throat and hugs Kory’s alligator to his sequined chest. He looks between father and daughter. “What are we talking about?”

“It’s not creepy if you don’t think it’s creepy,” Kory says to Mako instead of answering Jem. Reaching a hand out in her father’s direction, she asks, “Can we take a selfie? Candela wants to show him my costume and I told her not to use the picture I sent her earlier because that’s like, me in my bedroom.”

“Let me get this straight. You’re asking me to take a picture with you so you can send it to your friend so she can show your adult male teacher what you look like on your fifteenth birthday.” Mako allows his lips to purse and his head to bob back and forth atop his neck, abruptly stinking of pungent, skunk ass sarcasm. “Oh, yeah. Life’s a banquet, gets better with every year.”

“Daddy,  _ come on! _ ” Kory’s high, you’re-not-the-worst-dad-but-you’re-pretty-damn-close voice is loud enough to echo, to ricochet off of the trees and the cars and the oil-slick asphalt and picture perfect houses surrounding them on all sides. “He probably just asked about me because he knows Candela and I are friends!”

“Okay, okay…” Shaking his head and his hands, Mako retreats from the rapidly snowballing argument – walks out into the middle of the street to spin around in several dizzying, profoundly soothing little circles and stare up into the comforting blackness of the sky, suddenly years younger, suddenly Koryless and alone – before returning to stand at Jem’s side and ask him, “Am I being crazy? Sometimes I can’t tell.”

Jem leans bluely against the Hyundai’s driver’s side door. “Well,” he says, and makes the calculated decision to look at neither Mako nor Kory. “I do think there’s a lot of room for you to be overreacting.”

“Thank you!” Kory cries.

“I also think, however, that sending your teacher a picture of yourself, even indirectly, is marching right into the territory of sketchy, possibly even skeevy.” Jem turns to frown at Kory’s crestfallen face, to bring his shoulders up into a lopsided shrug. “I’d listen to your dad on this one.”

At this, Kory follows Mako’s astoundingly avoidant example of how to behave in the face of chastisement and says nothing at all, just sits until her phone’s screen fades to black and she is entirely inert atop the Hyundai’s silvery-brown hood. In the car, on the drive down St. Charles and South Carrollton Avenue, she stretches silence and speechlessness into hard taffy ribbons, staring out of the windows at Loyola and Tulane University, the college kids walking the streetcar line, Louisiana Pizza Kitchen and the exceedingly cute French café directly adjacent to it, all of the nighttime houses with none of their lights on in the windows. It is only after Jem turns right onto Freret Street from Broadway that she makes her little voice heard again, that she says, so softly Mako wouldn’t have heard if he wasn’t specifically listening for her: “I feel like you don’t trust me.”

He was waiting for her to say this. When he glances into the rearview mirror, her eyes are already there waiting for him, watching him.

“That’s just the thing, love,” he says, lips sticking together, his lipstick dry and the air wet as a summertime bayou. “It’s not you I don’t trust. It’s everyone else.”

“I don’t know what that has to do with me, though.” Kory sounds like she’s about to cry. Mako could punch himself for this.

“Listen.” He twists around in his seat to look at her directly, his moon princess with dew in her eyes. Beside him, Jem turns down the radio; Mako reaches into the backseat to touch his fingertips to one of Kory’s bare, glittery knees. “I know this is the last thing you want to talk about on your birthday, and believe me, I’d rather lie down in the desert and get eaten alive by a thousand flying fucking centipedes than have to have this conversation–”

“Flying centipedes don’t exist, Daddy,” Kory says, looking, despite her obvious distress, like she’s only just holding back a smile.

“I know they don’t. I was making a point.” Mako allows his mouth to pull gently upwards at the corners. “The world is an awful, terrifying, no-good, bad fucking place full of amoral people who will use you and take advantage of you and like you so much for what you happen to represent to them. You’re very sweet and very young and very easy on the eyes, my dear.”

Kory’s face is swallowed up in a deep scowl. “And that’s my fault?”

“It’s not your fault. Actually, you could make the argument that it’s me and your mum’s fault for having you when we did and winning the genetic lottery, or whatever.”

“That’s not your fault either, though. The genetic part, I mean.”

“I feel like this conversation is getting away from us.”

Kory frowns down at her lap, at her hands cupped there, holding nothing. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Stretching the little bit it takes to get his hand between Kory’s hands, Mako strokes his thumb over the inside of her wrist, at her soft skin and the tender veins running beneath – his wrist, his skin and his veins. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Kory. I just don’t want you to be in any position to be taken advantage of, okay? Does that make sense? It’s not your fault that you’re young and literally the most beautiful, sweet girl the Universe has ever breathed life into–”

“No, I’m not,” Kory breathes and, for the first time since the Calhoun Showdown, cracks a smile.

“Yes, you are.” Mako recoils his hand only to kiss his palm three times rapidly and then press that same palm to Kory’s knee, shakes her around until her face blooms and she’s giggling in such a way as to tear his guts to shreds. “You’re made of the sea and the stars and you’re everything, okay? Everything. I love you so much.”

Kory, with the great plastic moon on her brow and some perfect hydrangea color on her lips, puts her hand over his and says, “Yeah, ditto.” As it goes, always and without fail, his heart races and he is in pieces – all because of her. Her teeth, her fingers, her spinning and spiraling presence in the world. She is out of his hands and within and without his person, stitched into and bursting out of his right thigh. She is of him, and he’ll never be the same as he was before.

With the exception of the two weeks he spent under round-the-clock psychiatric care when she was three months old, Mako held Kory five hours a day every single day until she was two. That was three-thousand, two-hundred and ninety hours of physical affection, give or take some minutes when his bedtime came calling sooner than expected or Aroha arrived to take her off of his hands, saying, “You’re spoiling her. Leave her alone a little.” In part, this was a paranoid, clinical effort intended to prevent Mako from becoming the kind of father that resembled his own and Kory from feeling as underloved and psychologically barren as he so often did in his childhood. Fearing either outcome, Mako had her around people (around Jem, who inspired Kory to rambunctiousness with his own face-pulling silliness; around Tatum, who sometimes – oftentimes, truthfully – acted like a better mother than Aroha did half the time; around Blaise, who somehow knew what made Kory tick and how to invert her frowns in record time; around Mum, who became caramelized and candied in her granddaughter’s presence) and kept her suctioned or otherwise strapped to his bosom, side, or back as much as he could get away with while still living his own, fundamentally altered life. In fact, he carried and held her so much that she didn’t start walking until a month after her second birthday, and when Kory started walking, she ran.

She ran into Daddy’s arms, into his legs, clinging to his calves while he washed dishes and sang “Under the Boardwalk” after lunchtime. She ran across the cement carport in Porirua when Jem came to visit, cooing, “Jem, Jem, Jemmy, Jem,” until he picked her up and carried her around propped against his hip for upwards of the next two hours, since she’d fall into Audrey Rosian hysterics if he even hinted at letting her go. She had no concept of fear or pain, only loneliness when she threw herself out of bed at night and ran next door to kneel at her parents’ queen-size and cry out, “Daddy!” until he woke, sighing, and walked her back to her room so that she could tell him all about the dream she’d had, about the evening shapes on the ceiling, about the elusive god of sleep and winged animals, his name Nooui or something silly like that. Then she fell down the front steps and broke her collarbone, and she didn’t run again for the next seven months. 

Her world – previously a cocoon of arms, lips, and dark wooly hair – was newly and entirely dominated by the fear of getting hurt. She was rocked to the core in a way that rippled infinitely outwards, touching parts of herself that would not bud or come to fruition for years afterward. For the third year of her life, it took Mako’s hip, his side, and his arm wound around her thick puppy body for her to go anywhere, do anything that required even an ounce of bravery, her spoiled just as her mother said by Daddy’s perpetual embrace. “Come on, my little fish girl,” he’d say and scoop her up, groaning at her ballooning weight, to take her with him to his and Jem’s office for their freelance photography and camera repair company, or a film set where she’d sit and dazzle the underpaid actors with her brainbusting smile and unicorn laughter, or the biology department at Victoria U so she could get in some face time with her grandmother, or just into the dining room, to get Aroha to look at her.

“Say hi to Mummy,” he’d tell her.

“Hi!” came Kory’s shrill, obedient cry, her hand reaching out for her mother who sat at the dining table with the house phone against one ear.

“Say hi, Mummy,” Mako said then to Aroha, who rolled her eyes and put her hand to the phone’s mouthpiece.

“I’m on the phone, asshole,” she snapped, then, with a voice that just bordered on lifeless, squeezed Kory’s right foot and said, “Hi, baby.” She turned away without missing a beat, back to her conversation with God knows who. “No, I didn’t say I couldn’t do it. I just said I didn’t want to. There’s quite a difference.”

This string of words struck Mako as only a touch fitting. He carried Kory – his best friend, his life partner – away, and held her until bedtime.

He wanted things with a magnified intensity. He wanted Kory, when she slept twenty feet away in her bed so low to the ground, to come to him at night, needing him as he once despised being needed. He wanted to fuck Aroha like he used to, before he loved her, and he loved her damn near the moment he met her. He wanted to run away even then, years before New Orleans – wanted to liberate himself from New Zealand and the way it sat upon him with the weight of a god, crushing the air from his lungs, wrapping its hands around his wrists and ankles and neck. He wanted Nana Victoria. He wanted love. At 2:00 AM, he slipped out of bed and padded barefoot and half-naked down the hall to his studio. The 1984 Elna Jubile Swiss was the first machine to say, “Hello,” when he came in; closing the door, turning on the light, he reached for it and said, “It’s your turn for deconstruction, my dear.”

He used to think that the sewing machines were just about themselves. His Singer 7258 100-Stitch with its computerized sleekness, its automatic needle-threader eliminating the possibility of eye strain, its capacity to make seven-hundred and fifty stitches per minute, its oh so sexy way of coming apart so easily beneath his hands. His Brother XM2701 Lightweight, which came with its own instructional DVD, twenty-seven unique built-in stitches, and a one-step auto-size buttonholer that he used to fix all of Aroha’s pants in the wake of her post-pregnancy weight loss. His Janome HD3000 Heavy-Duty: bulky, masculine, with which he fashioned a flattish felt stegosaurus for Kory’s second birthday and which he spent the week after his and Aroha’s penultimate Big Fucking Fight tearing to pieces in his studio – not trying to make anything out of it, just gunning for its pure and simple destruction, its cathartic nonexistence at the hand of his handsaw, hammers, and cruel Phillips-head screwdriver. They never existed for their own sake, though. Machines and people never do.

The day after Kory’s fifteenth, they take an Uber to Mid-City to watch Endymion from KC and Godfrey’s front porch. Jem rides up front with the driver while Mako and Kory sit in the backseat, watching a YouTube video of a Japanese man making sushi for his cats. 

“Mummy didn’t call me yesterday,” Kory says, apropos of nothing, halfway through the video. Mako looks at her and finds her face mostly impassive, the only apparent tension in the space between her eyebrows. He frowns.

“Yeah?”

“She didn’t text me either.”

Mako scratches at his beard, watching the man in the video knead a strip of sashimi against chicken breast sliced almost microscopically thin, steamed, and worked into a doughy white ball. He knows that Kory and Aroha are friends on Facebook, that they are Skype contacts. He knows that her mother gave birth to her. “What is that? The second year in a row?”

“Third.”

He sighs, glances out of the window as the car crosses some short and sweet manmade body of water without a proper name. Putting his hand on Kory’s thigh, her sitting right next to him in the middle of the backseat instead of behind Jem at the opposite end of the car, he is too tired and unsurprised to be angry today. He’s ready to get drunk already. “I’m sorry, baby.”

“Why?” Kory locks her phone and leans her head against his shoulder. “It doesn’t matter. It’s not like she cares about me–”

“She  _ does _ care about you–”

“No, she doesn’t.” He can’t see her face, but Mako – intimately familiar with the rhythms of her voice, with the delicate texture of her larynx – knows that Kory’s eyes are moistening for the second time in less than twenty-four hours, and while she’s never been an optimist, per se – her having been quietly tortured by that old fear of getting hurt since the nasty spill of 2012 – her cynicism is nothing short of shocking when she says, “The last time she came to see me I was ten years old. I don’t even know what her hair looks like. I don’t remember how she smells. I literally came out of her body and she can’t even be bothered to remember the day it happened. She doesn’t care.”

From the front seat, Jem shoots Mako a sideways, surreptitious look. As usual, it is up to Mako to be “fair,” meaning he must be excessively, perhaps even inordinately easy on Aroha and make every kind of bullshit excuse under the sun on her behalf because, it has been said, this will be better for Kory in the end. He has never wanted Kory to hate her mother. More than anything, he’s wanted her to decide how she feels without his stupid feelings getting in the way. It’s for this reason that he says, “She cares, Kora. She’s just really, really bad at showing it. She’s always been bad with feelings, and like, responsibility, and being an adult in any way, shape, or form, but that doesn’t make her a bad person or mean that she doesn’t care about you.”

Kory sniffs wetly; he turns his head to kiss her crown. “Is that why you guys broke up? Because she’s bad with feelings and adulting?”

“Yeah,” Mako says. He’s not lying, but he isn’t telling the entire truth either.

“Do you still love her, though?”

Mako wants that drink bad. There is a hot metal kernel in the center of his forehead, pressing inward, screaming a little. 

“I do,” he says, because no lies, remember? Jem looks at him again, less covertly, and he fakes the brightest and most beautiful of smiles, wondering what happened to him, if he’s really changed at all in the past thirteen years if he still, somehow, loves Aroha.

He has changed. He feels this change acutely when, stepping out of the Uber onto Godfrey and KC’s front yard, he immediately reaches for Kory’s hand and does not let go of it until maybe thirty minutes later, after he’s barreled through three-fourths of a Long Island Iced Tea in record time and taken a seat at Godfrey’s Steinway, intending to drink more and play Elton John songs until the parade starts.

“I need to take a picture of this,” KC says from the dining table, airlifting her own cocktail out of Kai’s reach when he starts making grabby hands at it. “That’s Momma’s drink, baby.” She raises her head and starts to holler over Mako’s tipsy rendition of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” – “ _ Godfrey!  _ Come get your son some juice!”

“Why?” comes Godfrey’s voice drifting out of the living room seconds before he appears in the archway between it and the open concept dining area. He’s wearing a gross, New Orleansy T-shirt that only a straight man would ever put on his body – a voluptuous, oil-slick woman in a bikini and high heels printed across his chest and stomach, offending everyone within a ten-foot radius. “You’re closer. I been making drinks all day, babe.”

“Exactly,” KC says. “There’s a precedent.” Kai, sitting up high in her lap, begins to reach for her drink again and she scoots it with her fingers across the dark cedar of the tabletop, adding, “Also, I have cancer of the feet and chronic asshole syndrome. If you don’t do this for me you’ll be behaving in a very ableist manner.”

Godfrey swings his dull, almost deadpan gaze over to Mako. “Help me out, man.”

Mako, with a menthol cigarette burning out of the left side of his mouth, turns to Godfrey and sings, “ _ You can't plant me in your penthouse! I'm going back to my plough. _ ”

“Jem! You’ve got to come look at your man, here, he’s – he’s literally playing the piano, smoking, and drinking out of a fucking highball like some Billy Joel, late ‘90s piano bar dude.”

Having been so urgently summoned, Jem shows up in the archway at Godfrey’s side, carrying his own highball with amber liquid up to the glass’s halfway mark (he’s always, always been a more conscientious drinker than pretty much anyone else in the room). “Smoking?  _ Inside? _ ” he asks in Mako’s direction, his smile affectionate and filled with complex mixtures of warmth, admiration, and scrutiny. 

KC throws a sheepish glance in Jem’s direction. “We’re a laid-back household.”

“I don’t wanna move, baby,” Godfrey whines, slumped over hunchbacklike against the inside of the archway and wearing his bottom lip pushed all the way out into the Gulf of Mexico. “Do you know how hard it is to reach all the way up into the cabinet, and then reach all the way down into the fridge, and then pour all of those precious ounces into a glass?”

“Oh my  _ God _ , you’re unbearable,” KC says, but doesn’t make any moves herself. Instead, she snatches her phone up off of the table and says, “I’m taking a picture of Mako. Did everybody hear that? I’m taking a picture of Mako.”

Mid-line, Mako stops playing, pulls his cigarette out of his mouth, and notes, “I’m wearing sweatpants.”

“Your choice,” Jem points out.

“ _ Maybe you’ll get a replacement! _ ” Mako drums his fingers down hard against the Steinway’s ivory keys. Careening his head backward over his shoulders, gazing half-sideways and upside down at Jem, he wails, “ _ There’s plenty like me to be found! _ ”

“Actually, I’m recording a video,” KC announces, raising her phone’s camera lens to Mako’s theatrics.

“Can you imagine how diluted the effect of this whole shtick would be if he still vaped?” Jem asks as Kory passes between him and Godfrey into the room, barefoot and wearing Mako’s hip-hop Mickey Mouse T-shirt as a dress on this temperate Mardi Gras Eve. When KC releases a high, elephantine honk of a laugh, he grins, says, “I want you to think about some guy in an actual piano bar going at it, he’s so fucking cool and intense, and then! He pulls out!  _ A vape pen! _ ” Shaking his head: “It almost makes polluting your lungs with tar and other chemicals worth it, just to look dope while you play the piano.”

“I pollute my lungs with tar and other chemicals because I want to be dead by the time I’m sixty,” KC says with absolutely no hesitation. Godfrey scowls and makes his eyes so big as to nearly pop out of his head.

“Don’t say that in front of Kai, baby.”

“You want to die, Mommy?” Kai asks.

“Sometimes, yeah,” KC replies with a sort of casual, almost painful air of acceptance that would be admirable if it wasn’t completely inappropriate. “Only when I’m really sad, though.”

Godfrey opens his mouth to say something else, but before he can get the words out, Mako is thundering away at the piano, Jovian and kind of crazed, yowling oh so melodically into the air, “ _ Oh, I’ve finally decided my future lies, beyond, the yellow, brick, roooooooaaaaad! Aaa-aaaa-aaaah! Aaa-aaa-aaah! _ ” By the time he peters off into his tinkling, panting finale, the room is engulfed in applause – even Kai clapping his small hands together, stumbling down off of his mother’s lap to run over to the piano and climb up onto the bench beside Mako. Kory brings over a short, squat glass of apple juice.

“Aw, it’s amber like our drinks!” KC cries.

Mako takes a puff off his cigarette, throws back the remainder of his iced tea, then leans over to smack a loud, wet kiss against Kai’s giggling face. He looks at Kory, reaches out to grasp her wrist when she starts to retreat. “Any requests, my fish?”

“Phil Collins!” Godfrey shouts, cupping his hands around his mouth to achieve a megaphone effect. “Su-su-sussudio, bitch!”

“Do the Laura Branigan version of ‘Gloria’,” KC puts in. “I’ll record it and send it to Glo.”

“Man, I was going to say do some  _ Rocky Horror _ , but I actually really,  _ really  _ want to hear you do ‘Gloria’,” Jem utters with a sigh, then, drifting his eyes up to the ceiling, asks, “Why don’t we have a piano at the house?”

“Oh my God,  _ assholes _ , I asked Kory,” Mako says. Squeezing Kory’s wrist, pushing his thumb into her pulse, he gives her his silly, drunkish smile. “Anything you want.”

Kory smirks and tells him to do whatever calls to him most. “Gloria,” “Sussudio,” and half of the soundtrack of  _ The Rocky Horror Picture Show _ (which, by the way, Mako has completely memorized lyrically but has to Google the sheet music for on his phone) later, they are all sitting out on the front lawn in nylon fold-up chairs, Kai in Mako’s lap while he leans back against Jem on the grass, Kory dancing around in skipping, twirling circles to Endymion’s ongoing stream of Mardi Gras jazz.

“I’m scared for her,” Mako murmurs to Jem. He’s smoking another menthol, and Jem is holding his second Long Island Iced Tea in his right hand, and Kory’s back is the shape of the crescent moon as she twists herself around on the edge of the lawn, her shirt riding up to expose the thigh-high hemline of her mesh gym shorts, grass and dirt sticking to the bottoms of her naked, brown feet. 

Jem puts his mouth against the shell of Mako’s left ear; at this particular moment, Mako has to remind himself not to be turned on by this. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Mako sticks the yellow end of his cig between his lips. He struggles with the notion that he cannot protect Kory, the notion that he is, in some way, a monster that she needs protecting from in his simple inability to guarantee that her life is not impossibly chaotic for her. There are whole chasms in which there are whole worlds in the New Orleans pavement. Her parents don’t kiss each other anymore. The sun sets on the place of her birth seventeen hours before it ever sets on her. The Earth turns and the night comes and the dogs bark and they are all alone in this universe, even when they are together, lying next to each other in bed and breathing shallow sleepbreaths into the hot air of the evening.

Jem, exhaling hard through his nose, kisses the back of Mako’s head. “I think she’ll be fine,” he says – not with the carelessness of a person never having personally fathered a child, but with the sort of tender, agonizing trust in Mako that has only come out of years of loving the man more than any one person could imagine being loved.

Mako remembers their life, twelve and a half years ago. Sharing a bed with Jem in the aftermath of the separation from Aroha, Jem’s hand on his stomach in the dark, the energy between them changed and suddenly colored bloody red with some undertones of violet. Being quietly, wordlessly invited into that forbidden world of real devotion, highly politicized same-sex whatever the fuck after failing so spectacularly at heterosexual coupling, his and Jem’s mutual desire jutting out into the space between them, and him refusing, saying, “I’m too tired for that.” Sleeping on the futon so that he and Jem wouldn’t undergo the torturous temptation of lying side by side in bed every night, loving each other and both of them – but especially him – too scared to devolve into the kissing, touching, over-the-moon fucking demanded by that love. Waking up in the morning to Kory wriggling against his back; getting her arms and as much of her body as possible up the back of his T-shirt; pulling hilariously on the short hairs growing out of his arms and his stomach; her his suction cup, loathe to let him go. They all ate breakfast in the kitchen listening to Lou Reed on those mornings, and Mako felt his life stretch out before him as a fuzzy, half-translucent quilt when he and Jem talked about making a film about Internet catfish with their friends, when Kory ate the strips of Nueske’s bacon right off of his plate without shame, when Mum called to ask him when she was going to see her granddaughter again, and the Wellington wind blew against Jem’s house loud enough to howl. He kissed Kory all over her full moon face, and it was entirely characteristic of her – her love for him, her little girl excitability – that she laughed then until she got the hiccups. Jem looked at him as if to ask, “When do I get a turn?” but said nothing.

These days, Jem can’t say enough. Kory laughs still, but more often than not at her phone. Mum is much closer and Aroha is much farther, and the New Orleans wind couldn’t hold a candle to Wellington’s gale-force blasts. The more things change, the more they stay the same.


	15. 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is the chapter where underage sex is referenced. to be clear, it _is_ an adult/minor relationship, not a child/child relationship. there's nothing explicit, i just figured i'd warn for the relationship rather than accidentally trigger someone.

#  _ 15 _

The Wellington Teasippers were founded in the December of 2003 under the influence of horrendous quantities of alcohol, healthy doses of perhaps well-justified arrogance, and what could only be described as the exuberance of youth. The events leading up to their formation being taken at face value, they were probably never meant to exist. Teenagers, after all, were never meant to socialize in the informal afterhours with their adult, alcoholic, and recently divorced authority figures; and adolescent friendships were never meant to exist beyond the temporal confines of teenhood or, at the very most, young adulthood; and Mako Gehringer and Jeremiah Tui’s acquaintanceship was, at the time, about as unlikely and as fragile as Mako’s level-three Mew in his Pokémon Blue Version on GameBoy; and, above all, high school students didn’t just up and start theatre companies like it was no big deal. That kind of get-up-and-go was reserved for university kids with no better to do with their free time and established creatives who had nothing to lose prestigiously or monetarily. 

Still, on the week before Christmas, when they all said they were sleeping over at Jem’s (in Mako and Quick’s case), Loren’s (in Tatum’s), Tatum’s (in Loren’s), and Quick’s (in Jem’s), Mako Gehringer, Tatum Wharerahi, Jeremiah Tui, Loren Atwood, and Kirby Quickley sat drinking undiluted absinthe out of teacups in Blaise Peltier’s living room, watching  _ It’s a Wonderful Life  _ on the tube and pretending, as seventeen year olds, that they’d all been here, doing this when the fact of the matter was that Blaise was an incredibly corrupting influence on almost all of them, save Mako, who had spent his last six months in Raukokore smoking so much cannabis and drinking so many vodka Gatorades that he might have been considered a teenage candidate for  _ Intervention  _ once upon a time.

“Thanks, guys,” Jem said, sitting cross-legged on the dirty carpeted floor with his back against the sofa and his head pillowed against Mako’s knees. He raised his teacup to Blaise, who was in the kitchen absolutely butchering popcorn on the stove. “Thank you, Blaise, for my birthday absinthe!”

“What kind of teacher would I be if I wasn’t trying to get you flat-on-your-arse drunk on the anniversary of your birth?” When Loren came up to the breakfast bar to top herself off, Blaise grinned at her the way he did at school when he thought no one was looking (except, of course, for Quick, who was always looking and whose looking simply could not be helped). “Also, please be careful with these cups, my little ducklings! They’re like, the only truly valuable thing I got in the divorce from the gorgon.”

Mako, sipping his absinthe and slowly savoring the sweet licorice burn against the roof of his mouth and in the back of his throat, felt no shame in narrowing his eyes at Blaise and asking, “Wouldn’t that be the reason to  _ not _ be careful with the cups? In fact, wouldn’t that be the reason for us all going outside and breaking the cups on your driveway? Have you ever heard of catharsis?”

Blaise snapped and pointed a finger at Mako. “I  _ taught _ you the word ‘ _ catharsis _ ’, young man. Don’t get smart with me, bro.”

“I don’t know, Blaise,” Tatum chimed in, holding her teacup with her pinkie swung out all posh-like. “I’m inclined to agree with Mako.”

“We’ll try to contain our astonishment,” Quick said in a tone that would have been downright mean if it wasn’t coming out of his mouth. Tatum gave him the forks, and Mako laughed, put his hand on Tatum’s right ankle and hoped that the gesture made her shiver with delight.

They’d all gotten so close in the wake of  _ 70 Scenes _ . Well, perhaps more accurately, Mako had gotten so close to them in the wake of  _ 70 Scenes _ . Where Tatum, Quick, Loren, and Jem had already had two years of interpersonal love between one another and inappropriate closeness with Blaise beneath their belts, he’d come into the collective friendship with a swiftness and a lubrication that could only be explained by his dramatic talents and his status in Wellington as objectively the coolest thing ever since refrigerators were imported to the islands. He didn’t understand exactly why or what made him so cool; if you asked Tatum in the first few months of their coexistence, she probably would have blamed his  _ Thriller  _ jacket and the fact that he’d made the “best worst joke ever” on the first day of junior year theatre class; Loren a year later, and she would have mentioned his killer sense of humor; Quick, and he might have said something about “how cute he was to the girls”; Jem, and he would have told you it was because of Mako’s unflinching, kind of painful honesty. It was in light of this apparent coolness that Mako sat with Tatum’s legs threaded through his on Blaise’s plaid sofa riddled with holes and dried cat piss, with Jem’s curly head within arm’s reach, watching Quick and Loren try (and fail, pretty much) at playing Old Maid on the floor in front of the coffee table and eating blackened popcorn that stuck in his absinthey teeth.

“I want to do something fun for New Year’s,” Blaise announced as he brought out the second silver bowl of burnt popcorn and the remainder of the absinthe. Tatum, who had an unusual predilection for anything charred (as well as for the smell of gasoline, the sensations that accompanied picking both her own scabs and the scabs of others, and System of a Down, which everyone else in the friend group save for Mako thought was kind of awful), immediately reached for a handful of the white-and-black junk and began to shove it bit by bit into her mouth. “Me and the gorgon–”

“The gorgon and I,” Mako corrected, merciless.

“Not necessarily,” Jem said, and Mako indulged himself in the low pleasure of flicking the other in the back of the head.

“Can you not call her ‘ _ the gorgon _ ’?” Loren asked, pulling a new card from the deck face-down on the carpet and adding it to her hand, which she then began to shuffle around. “I feel like that’s so mean, for her to just not have her own name anymore.”

“You don’t get it, though, Loren.” Quick made his eyes comically large as he and Loren exchanged hands. “She doesn’t  _ deserve _ a name anymore!”

“You kids are worse than my inner demons,” Blaise commented, blasé as anything, then raised his voice a little: “ _ Can I speak?! _ The gorgon and I used to do  _ Rocky Horror _ around this time of year with our mates in the theatre scene, but she took almost all of them in the divorce–”

“Oh my God, that’s so sad,” Tatum cooed, somehow managing to sound both genuinely sympathetic and derisively mocking at the same time. “You don’t have any friends so now you have to hang out with your students!”

“I’m more depressed about it than you are, little lady,” Blaise groaned, getting himself down onto the floor beside Jem, in front of the sofa, where Tatum would have to reach over his shoulder to get to the popcorn. “How old am I? Thirty-two? And the only people who give a shit about me are my goddamn students – and you all  _ suck _ at it, by the way.”

“I thought you loved our youthful sarcasm,” Mako remarked.

Blaise gave him the dull-eyed look of a man who was deeply and profoundly exhausted by life’s machinations. “You make me so tired, Mako.”

This, Jem burst into laughter in response to. Mako thought about flicking the other in the head again, but instead drained the last of the absinthe from his teacup and reached for the skull-shaped bottle resting precariously on the edge of the coffee table. Halfway through the lime green pour, Blaise swung his arm over and began making beckoning motions with his hand, saying, “Gimme that, you shit. Sharing is caring.”

“So, wait!” Tatum all but yelled, sitting up straight on the sofa and staring greenly off into the television screen without actually seeing it. Her hand not holding her teacup reached out graspingly – fingers aimlessly curling, uncurling, and recurling – in the air; she giggled a little when Mako raised his own hand to interlace their digits. “You want us to do  _ Rocky Horror  _ with you? Like in a movie theatre and everything?”

“You’ll have to lie some more to your parents,” Blaise intoned, with a sort of casual bent to his voice that was familiar and would become even more so during future conversations about circumventing the inconvenient rules of common decency and propriety. He drank absinthe straight from the bottle, licked his lips, then flung his arms outward and upward into the air. “But who cares, right?! You’re practically adults already anyway.”

Which is how they all fell asleep with dreams of borderline sexually explicit community theatre crusting and crackling along with the sand in their eyes – Jem and Quick on the living room floor on a pallet constructed from the unwashed blankets of the previous two months, passing a GameBoy Advance back and forth; Mako and Tatum wrapped around each other on the couch, pretending they weren’t kissing when they so obviously were; Loren in Blaise’s bed with the hands of a man fifteen years her senior up the front of her T-shirt, caressing her naked breasts; and their name, their name a question floating unanswered in the air until the next afternoon when, atrociously hungover, Tatum pronounced hoarsely into the air, “Teasippers.”

Drooling against her back, Mako mumbled, “ _ Wha _ aa-?” Jem, the first of them to have woken up, raised his head off of the pallet to communicate the same basic sentiment with his eyes alone, the lids narrowed and the sclera very obviously bloodshot. 

“That’s what we should call ourselves.” Tatum briefly raised one of the empty teacups sitting on the coffee table into the air for emphasis. “The Wellington Teasippers.”

“We weren’t sipping tea, though,” Jem said, always so smart after a night of hard drinking.

“Nobody needs to know that,” Tatum replied. When Mako’s arms tightened around her middle, his right leg sandwiched between her thighs, she released a gentle laugh and settled back into his sleepy embrace. “It’s cool, right? We sound sophisticated.”

“Eh,  _ stop talking _ ,” Quick said into his pillow. Tatum, Mako, and Jem all laughed in unison, and Quick pulled his blanket over his head and made a noise kind of like a dying emu. “I feel pain.”

At that moment, Loren came into the room. She was wearing one of Blaise’s T-shirts – one that was about two sizes too small on him but fit her with just a little room to spare in the sides and the shoulders – and her own panties, turned inside out. Tatum, Mako, and Jem all stared at her, the invisible cat in the room gnawing on their tongues.

“What are we talking about?” Loren asked.

“Tea,” Jem said.

“I hope I get to be Rocky,” Tatum said with nothing but the utmost seriousness. She ran her hand over Mako’s arm where it was hooked around her stomach, turned her head towards the ceiling to approximate speaking directly into his ear. “Will you still like me when I’m prancing around on stage in gold spandex underwear?”

Mako put his face into all of Tatum’s long, dark hair and smelled coconuts, sweat, and the cigarettes he’d been smoking last night, when they’d gone on a walk around the neighborhood and she’d asked him to kiss her on the mouth when he put his arm around her shoulders. She was maybe his first love. He said, “Yeah. I’ll like you more than anything.”

**Okay, do you remember the OG Teasippers, when we did** **_Rocky?_ ** **You remember our Rocky, that guy – Neil whatshisface?**

**Cesnik.**

**Neil Cesnik, yeah. With the beautiful blond hair and the most perfect mouth I’ve ever seen on a man.**

**Didn’t he move to Auckland when we were freshmen at Victoria? Didn’t he like, have multiple sclerosis?**

**I don’t know, bro. I hooked up with that guy, though.**

**Mako. Get the fuck out of here, Mako.**

**I’m serious! That night when Blaise took us to Dreamgirls Fuck Yeh and you guys couldn’t find me for like two hours? I was making out with Rocky Horror. That was the first time I ever kissed a guy, and it went on for** **_ages_ ** **.**

**I thought you and Tatum were vibing then, though?**

**I hate to tell you this, Jeremiah… but I was a big ol’ slut. Tatum made out with him, too, during that week in November when we were broken up for the first time.**

**I don’t know what to do with this information. I feel like I don’t know you two anymore.**

**It was those underpants, dude. Those golden underpants and that beautiful fucking mouth.**

On the morning of December 28 th , 2003, Mako came home to 50 Salamanca Road with his nails painted Sally Hansen Hard As Nails Xtreme “Red-ical Rockstar” and the blackness of eyeliner smeared around his eyes, his mouth so rubicund as to suggest either the previous wearing of lipstick or a particularly vigorous make-out session (or, in this particular case, both). Jem, who had turned out not to be such a limp dick whiny bitch and could actually be called Mako’s friend at the time, was with him, looking less thoroughly debauched but just as bone-tired. After a night of dancing, miming, and lip-syncing as Dr. Frank-N-Furter and Brad Majors for mixed and assorted members of the local theatre scene and the equally esoteric, equally passionate LGBT community in Wellington and then, in the aftermath, drinking themselves silly at probably the one bar in the city that didn’t bother to card, both boys were ready to fall right into Mako’s bed, sleep for the next nine hours, and then get up and do it all over again tonight. Rui Ngata, on the other hand, had dissimilar plans.

“Mako Kahurangi Gehringer!” She stood then in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen, hands on her hips, long hair flowing down loose over her back and shoulders. The use of the full name did not bode well for anything that might have happened between the next five minutes to the next three months. “Where the hell have you been?!”

Mako gave Jem a tired, bored look that managed to communicate both his dissatisfaction with his mother’s tone and his utter expectation of it. Jem, who had a bipolar mother of his own, simply looked sympathetic in return.

“I told you, Mum,” Mako said, adjusting the strap of his backpack – which contained his costume, his stage makeup, and Mum’s cellphone, which she’d given to him after he’d left the previous night – over his left shoulder. “We were at Robbie’s. We overslept a little. I’m sorry.”

“Nobody answered their phones last night,” Mum said, stalking across the living room in his direction amidst the thick coffee smell that permeated the air. Mako wondered what sort of magical time existed on his mother’s hands for her to spend the wee hours of the morning calling every house and cellphone number that had been provided to her, and he hoped, in some small and pathetic way, that the shadowy state of the house at eight o’clock in the morning, with all its curtains drawn and most of the lights out, would at least somewhat mask the condition of his face.

“We were sleeping,” he said.

“Bullshit. Your father is a fucking nut, but I’ve always agreed with him when it comes to your brother. I don’t like you spending time with him.” With this, Mum finally reached Mako and was able to look at him, at the duskiness smeared across his eyelids and his rosy red mouth. Her brow furrowed deeply. “Are you… are you wearing makeup?”

Mako dragged his fingertips across his left eyelid and then peered at those fingertips as if he was seeing the waxy black residue for the first time. “Oh, crap,” he said. “I thought that had all come off.” He smiled, flippant as all get out. “Robbie has this friend; she’s like, a cosmetology student. She wanted to use a Maori face.”

Mako could feel Jem straining not to laugh behind him. He curved his hand around his back and wiggled his fingers in the other boy’s direction: a silent imperative to be cool.

Openly, Mum inhaled deeply through her nose, trying to smell the alcohol that would have still tainted his breath had he and Jem not brushed their teeth before leaving Blaise’s fifteen minutes ago. Detecting nothing but minty freshness, she gave him one of her deepest frowns, one that signaled her mounting rage with the fact that she, knowing him as well as she did, could not get him to crack. She knew he’d been up to something. He knew she knew he’d been up to something. She just couldn’t prove it, and this pissed her off more than knowing what he’d done would have. 

“Go to your room,” she snapped, turning away and heading back in the kitchen’s direction. “Hello, Jeremiah,” she uttered as an afterthought.

“Sorry, Ms. Rui,” Jem called back as Mako led him upstairs. As soon as Mako’s bedroom door closed behind them, Jem loosed the snickering, almost disbelieving laughter he’d been keeping under wraps in the minutes before, dumping his backpack on the floor by his feet and just letting it rip while Mako danced a little around his room, twirling around before falling backward onto his bed.

“I’m a wizard, I know.”

“I’ve never seen anyone lie that easily.”

“Oh, please.” Mako began to pull his T-shirt up and over his head in the December heat, stripped this and his blue jeans off of his body until he laid half-naked in the center of his bed, tired out of his mind and ready to go back to sleep. “It’s called acting. It’s all we do.”

“Yeah, but that was your mum…” Jem remarked as he began to do the same as Mako, removing his T-shirt, his jeans, his shoes and socks. When Mako rolled over to hug the window, he got in bed beside the other and pulled the thin blanket on top of the comforter over his body. Mako caught the blanket with his toe and right hand; Jem was all too happy to share the covering with him.

“My mum’s a bitch,” Mako said.

Jem closed his eyes, his bare shoulder touching Mako’s. “At least she pays the bills on time.” He pulled his glasses off and reached across Mako’s body to put them on the windowsill, and their naked closeness was new – a little thrilling to both of them, not that either made this apparent while trapped in the amber of new friendship and internalized homophobia – but also almost entirely lacking in overt meaning after they’d spent the previous night gyrating around and against each other for the pleasure of audience members who’d had no clue that both of them were literal teenagers. Mako yawned, felt comfortable and exhausted enough to let his hip touch Jem’s, his breath pool sideways into the juncture of the other’s neck and shoulder. 

For slippery, slightly tacky moments, they laid together, perpendicular to the thin stripe of sunlight that cast itself through the tiny gap between Mako’s curtains. Downstairs, Mum puttered noisily around in the kitchen – there was the clinking of glasses, the opening and closing of drawers, the muttering sound of her talking to herself, and Mako quietly nursed his dread that her irritation would spike and send her up the stairs to rouse him for whatever bullshit reason came to her first, keep him up cleaning his room, or washing the dishes, or just listening to her bitch at him for the rest of the day, or some delightful combination of all three. Jem, for his part, tried to close his eyes and found himself unable to stop opening them so that he could drift them curiously around Mako’s room – looking at all of the faded photographs of the curly-headed little boy playing with sheep and goats on the walls, the sketch paper doodles of the Sistine Chapel ceiling and winged mermaids pinned to the bulletin board, the colorful Polynesian tapestry hung across the doorless closet and filled with pinwheeling white flowers, the paper lampshade with drawings in watercolor pencil all over it. 

Eventually, when Mako was perhaps mere moments from sleep, Jem said, “I just thought about Loren.”

Mako, recalling the previous night when the girl had danced across the stage in a push-up bra and miniskirt that had, horror of all horrors, literally belonged to Blaise’s ex-wife once upon a time, opened his eyes to gaze at Jem’s sleepy profile, the other boy staring half-blindly at the ceiling. He threw the arm not pressed against Jem’s up over his head. “Why?”

Jem blinked for a long time, eyelids weighted with fatigue. “Her and Blaise,” he said, then – obviously both uncomfortable and so exhausted it was hard to form coherent sentences – shook his head, mouth open. “Do you. Do you think they had sex?”

“Of course they had sex,” Mako replied in a somewhat sophisticated tone that hid just how juvenilely, kind of naively horrified he was at the prospect. The truth was, he didn’t know how to feel about it; he swallowed thickly. “Hasn’t it been a long time coming?”

“I don’t know, it’s weird.” Jem started to put his hands over his face, but changed his mind at the last minute and just put them down to rest against his chest, the dark hair that was just beginning to sprout there. “Like, we’ve known him since we were fourteen years old.”

“Yeah…”

“She’s always been his favorite.”

Mako frowned a little across his pillow at Jem. “I thought you were his favorite.”

Jem turned to look at him head-on. “Are you saying that I should have been the one having sex with him?”

“That’s so weird, oh my God!” Mako cried, moving to momentarily hide his face beneath his left bicep.

“Also, yeah, no. Loren is his fave. She was the first kid in Theatre I to audition and she was like,  _ brilliant _ , of course–”

“Yeah, she’s so fucking cool,” Mako conceded.

“I feel weird about this.” Jem’s face was gentle, almost dejected. He knew how to wear gloominess so well; Mako suspected this was the reason for his being cast as the leading man in  _ 70 Scenes _ and as Brad in  _ Rocky Horror _ . “I mean… what are we going to do now? Our teacher is dating our friend?”

Mako looked at Jem with a sort of quiet childishness about his expression, feeling abruptly and acutely a desire to be far away, and to be far away with Jem in particular. It wasn’t the first time he wondered if Jem would like Raukokore. It wasn’t the first time he had no idea what this wondering meant or where it had come from, like on the day they stopped hating each other and all he’d wanted to do was lie in the street with the other, throttled and choked by Wellington in general but somehow okay with the Jeremiah-shaped part of it. 

He asked, “Isn’t Blaise our friend, too?”

Jem watched him and he watched back. There was so much they wanted to talk about, but they just fell asleep instead. At 7:28 PM, Mako woke and found Jem lying on his stomach beside him, reading one of his books –  _ Seven Up _ , a Janet Evanovich hardback he’d stolen from his mother’s bookshelf.

“This is totally a book for like, working women in their thirties,” Jem remarked without looking up. Mako flung his leg outwards to kick Jem. 

“ _ I’m _ a working woman in my thirties,” he said, grinning, yawning, stretching like a cat.

“Me, too,” came Jem’s immediate reply, and then they were laughing, still exhausted after eleven hours of sleep and deliriously high on the likeness between them; the clandestine nature of their nighttime activities; the Transsexual, Transylvanian Time Warp; their own teenage, unbathed partial nakedness and everything that said about them. 

It wasn’t just the  _ Rocky Horror _ nights they spent together in this manner. Throughout the Christmas/summer break that stretched from mid-December 2003 to the very beginning of February 2004, they passed their evenings listening to Nana Victoria’s old American Spring, Beatles, and Hall & Oates records on the gramophone at 50 Salamanca or driving from Jem’s house on Cluny Avenue along the winding, almost vascular roads to pick up some shitty cult movie from the Aro Street Video Shop, which they watched after Mako made his adolescent staple – garlic noodles and buttered French bread – for Jem and his mother, both of whom could not cook to save their lives.

“Can I hire you as my personal chef?” Lee Ann Apfelbaum – the modern artist and metalworking sculptress that worked only part-time as Jem’s mother – asked from beneath her cloud of wild, Jewish curls. She’d spent the previous three minutes or so moaning with pure delight at the so-called “complexity” of flavor that Mako had managed to achieve with his dish, purring in such a manner that made Jem want to sink directly into the core of the Earth and refuse to return out of simple mortification, if the deeply distraught look on his face was anything to go on.

Mako twisted yellowy noodles around his fork and put on an easy smile. “What kind of salary are we talking about?”

“Please ignore her,” Jem said, face red. It was so disarming – so ridiculously, impossibly cute – that Mako could only laugh and pretend the laughter was about what Jem had said instead of how he’d looked. 

“Oh, come  _ on _ , Jeremiah.” Lee Ann’s hand flew across the table to rest upon and fiddle with Jem’s; to Mako’s perverse delight, Jem didn’t pull away from his mother’s touch, just tolerated it out of love and blushed even harder. Lee Ann had a smile that was somewhat breathtaking – not gap-toothed or dimpled like her son’s, but with the same sort of unbearable, miraculous carnality that made Mako want to pack all of his things and move in. She turned to Mako and said, out of nowhere, “He’s never told you about his name, has he? In the Hebrew Bible, Jeremiah was one of the four Major Prophets. He’s called ‘ _ the weeping prophet _ ’ because all he ever does is complain – a big old doomsayer, this guy was.”

Mako grinned at Jem, who, with a lowered head, looked at him from beneath dark eyelashes. “Talk about a fitting name,” he quipped, and ducked when Jem started to throw a fork across the table at him.

“My little pessimist,” Lee Ann cooed, moving her hand into Jeremiah’s feathery mop of hair. “My angel with the darkest wings.” Her expression turned to butter, and Mako felt like such a happy intruder, trespassing within the secret, intimate space that mother and son occupied and he only had a superficial understanding of. She said, in a way that would ring in Mako’s ears when, years later, he had a conversation about a similar subject with Aroha in a bathtub in Kaikoura, “He’s so bad at liking things. He was bad at liking  _ you _ when he met you.”

“Mum,” Jem groaned.

“Every night when he came home from school, there was some other awful thing you’d done.”

“Mum, come on, please.”

“Imagine my surprise when one evening, it’s, ‘I’m going to the Roxy with Mako,’ and I say, ‘No Quick? No Tatum? No Loren?’” Lee Ann shook her head and grinned. “I knew the boy did protest too much.”

Mako, profoundly amused and a little bashful in the face of such a revelation, smiled and shoveled slippery noodles into his mouth so that he wouldn’t have to say anything. He’d had some meta, overarching ideas about the way things had gone between him and Jem from Jem’s perspective but, being a teenager and a patent narcissist, hadn’t devoted much time to considering such ideas beyond the fleeting midnight periods of speculation, when Jem slept beside him and he wondered why the other boy even liked him after resenting him for so long, wondered about – as previously discussed – his own aforementioned, supposed coolness. He wanted to go home so badly during those middle-of-the-night musings. He wanted to drive off north every time he hopped in the passenger’s seat of Jem’s piece-of-shit Rabbit.

Buckling himself up on that garlic noodle/French bread night, Jem taking him to the Kiwi Mart on Taranaki so he could get a pack of Winfields with his fake ID, he threw his gaze across the center console and uttered in the huskiest of tones, “Jeremiah.”

Smelling bullshit, Jem closed his eyes as he twisted his keys in the ignition and said, very softly, “Don’t.”

“I love you so much, Jeremiah,” Mako crooned, almost gasping with the unadulterated, completely affected melodrama of the moment. The sinking afternoon sun in his eyes, an invisible wad of velvet in his mouth, he pushed his palm into his left breast. “I have the impossible urge to kiss you.”

“I’ll take you home,” Jem said. The car refused still to start, instead neighed horselike every time Jem screwed his keys clockwise. “I’ll take you home right now, you egg.” When Mako closed his eyes and puckered his lips briefly, playfully in Jem’s direction, the boy whipped a hand over and caught him loudly in his Adam’s apple, sending them both devolving into half-hysterical laughter and wrestling with each other in the front seat: Mako shoving the heel of his hand into Jem’s left jaw; Jem grabbing at both of Mako’s wrists and pinning them momentarily to the Rabbit’s suede ceiling; the air in the summer warm and kind of salty with Wellington’s proximity to the sea; Dido on the radio, singing, “ _ I want to thank you for giving me the best day of my life _ .” Then they slid down Cluny Avenue beneath an orange sky, flanked by walls of greenery dotted with vibrant periwinkle flowers; along to Raroa Road, where they peered out upon the neighborhood as it sank down and rose above on terraces alongside and below; into Aro Street, where graffiti decorated the wooden fences and Mako enjoyed peering into people’s yards and wondering out loud what kind of lives they lived.

“That’s like the second gnome I’ve seen.” Mako craned his neck to look behind him as the Rabbit retreated past a bright red house with olive green trim and, as he said, a meticulously painted and clothed wooden gnome in its front yard, hanging out with a fake toadstool. “Who buys gnomes for their gardens? Superstitious people? People who bake pies? People who listen exclusively to lute music and keep jars full of pennies?”

“I keep a jar full of pennies,” Jem commented, leaning a little into his steering wheel.

“I’m keeping my eye on you.”

“Piss off.”

Mako grinned. “I just, I wonder, you know. Like, when you live by yourself and you have disposable income and you’re not worried about your prescriptions or some consuming medical condition or possibly losing your job, why would you buy a gnome for your garden? Why, of all the useless shit that you could spend money on – of all the useless shit that you could decorate your house with, like, like, like fairy lights or plastic flowers or throw pillows – why would you buy  _ gnomes? _ I can see flamingos. They’re pretty. Gnomes are just short, ugly, old men, though. I don’t even know what they’re supposed to symbolize.”

“They hoard precious gems and give confer aid to humans,” Jem said, somewhat sarcastically, in a voice that suggested an expert level of knowledge on the subject as the car passed by a block of aesthetically pleasing townhouses. 

“So, what, they’re like… you?” Mako asked. This time, he anticipated Jem’s hand, grabbed it in midair and shoved it down against the center console hard enough to pull an “Ow!” out of the other, to which he sheepishly replied, “Sorry.” 

Shaking his hand as if the act would loosen and then release the sensation of pain from the extremity – shaking his head, too, at Mako’s general ridiculousness and his presence – Jem said, “Mum used to have this friend who’d come around and talk to me about the adventures of his Dungeons and Dragons character. He was a forest gnome named Quagmire.”

“Quagmire?”

“He’d traveled all the way across the world looking for some, like, Hope Diamond type thing before he realized that all he really wanted to do was go back home to see his wife and child again. It was kind of sweet. I think I liked Quagmire.”

Mako squinted at the dashboard, at the bland asphalt taffy ribbon unfurling unappetizingly before him beyond the windshield. “Doesn’t the word quagmire mean, like, a bad way? Like, ‘ _ oh, you’re in a quagmire _ ’ means ‘ _ you’re in a pickle _ ’ or ‘ _ you fucked up, dude’ _ .”

“A quagmire is also a swamp,” Jem said. “If you think about it, Quagmire was in a quagmire because he was stuck so far away from home.”

“Who was this guy? The guy who made Quagmire, I mean.”

“Some…” Jem raised his hands temporarily off of the steering wheel, groaning a little as he searched for the word. “Sculptor. He made lots of dragons and salamanders and lions and other, like, ‘ _ cool _ ’ animals out of wood and cast aluminum and papier-mâché.”

“My nan and I used to make things out of papier-mâché,” Mako commented, the words flying out of his mouth before he could think to hold them back. Jem, like Tatum, was a person around whom it was easy to just talk, who seemed to dial back Mako’s internal defenses and tap into, without trying, his insatiable desire to be known and thus to share everything indiscriminately. “I always hated the texture of it when it was wet, but then at the end when we got to paint everything, it made up for all the gross, wet paste feelings.”

“I want to see them, the sculptures,” Jem said, pulling Mako’s mouth out softly sideways and upward. 

“They’re all way back in my old house.” Mako leaned far back into his seat and sighed, suddenly directly within the firing range of the Rabbit’s frankly shit air conditioning. “Maybe one day I’ll go back and I’ll get all of them for you. You can have them.”

Jem looked at him briefly before making a left turn onto Willis Street. “You don’t want them?”

“No.” Mako rubbed ambiguously, casually at his right cheek. “They’re too important.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

As they did and would do with increasing frequency, Mako and Jem gazed at each other, seeing each other, communicating untold complexities and nuances that simply would not come across in words, quietly questioning what was not wholly apparent. At this point in time, Jem was not very well-versed in Mako’s language of contradictions and emotional conundrums; wanting to learn, though, he smiled a little and murmured, “I guess it doesn’t have to.”

“That’s generally the way it goes in my head,” Mako replied. “Thanks for getting it.”

Jem saluted him with two fingers swiping briefly past his left temple. They rode on to the Kiwi Mart in silence interceded by the Adult Contemporary station on the radio – Celine Dion and Christina Aguilera, honey voices and easy rhythms.

**I’m writing everything you just said down so you can use it in your future autobiography.**

**What, when I get famous? Just imagine it, Jem: a memoir chronicling our days as young and carefree closeted queers in the cultural hotspot that is Wellington in the early oughts, on an intrepid journey for laughs, old-fashioned good times, and** **_blow_ ** **in every sense of the word.**

**Would anyone actually pay to read that, do you think?**

**I’d have to change your name, probably, if you ever wanted to get work again. Are you partial to anything in particular?**

**I want to hear your ideas, actually.**

**I’ve always liked the name** **_Irving_ ** **. I think it’s because of** **_Chicago_ ** **. Remember when the movie came out and we went to see it at the Roxy? I think that was technically our first date – we** **_did_ ** **share a bucket of popcorn with the Milk Duds in it just the way I like it, and there** **_was_ ** **that moment when we both reached for a handful and our fingers touched and it was** **_so_ ** **romantic–**

**How does this have anything to do with the name Irving?**

**Oh, yeah! Remember that part in the “Cell Block Tango” when one of the ladies is talking about her artsy boyfriend Lipschitz? She says she killed him because he went and cheated on her with Ruth, Gladys, Rosemary? I think? And** **_Irving_ ** **. And ever since then, that name has just– all I can think is** **_gay side thing_ ** **every time I hear it, and if those three words aren’t just the encapsulation of my entire high school and college existen –** **_What?_ **

**Really, there’s just… no possible way you could have been anything at all but outrageously homosexual, Mako.**

They liked to talk all night.

Between them existed a perpetual aperture; a firm and gentle, always thrumming energy that necessitated them lying together and running their mouths on nights before Jem had to accompany his mother to temple or Mako was to spend the day’s earlier hours shopping with Robbie or some such shit. They took their sleepovers to Jem’s house because there it was much easier to sneak out and go driving up to Poriura to take walks in the lush green dark and lie down adjacent to botanical gardens, to reservoirs of olive-colored water, to gradient stretches of grass that laid high above the rest of the town; or, alternately, to turn the music up in Jem’s room and talk beneath the dreamy, beachy sounds of Mazzy Star until their limbs felt crushingly heavy and the digital alarm clock read 4:49 AM. On these summer nights, during which Mako slowly came to believe in the deeply hopeful corners of his mind that the Universe had matched his soul with Jem’s, they spoke about their classmates in conversations that could not quite be considered instances of shit-talking so much as they were honest, kind of mean, but very fair reflections on everyone they’d eventually have to go back to seeing five days a week every week; or Lee Ann’s boyfriends of the past and the ones Jem missed because they used to talk to him about the weirder things that he didn’t feel comfortable discussing with those in his age group – he didn’t trust them to understand what was going on, he said, because they didn’t have the maturity or the experience of these older men who’d been around the block before, principally with his crazy mum; or the pleasures and pains of being Jewish and Maori in tandem, of rugelach and hakas, of nasty faces given to them in public places, of speaking Hebrew (which Jem did) and  _ te reo _ (which Mako did), of curly hair and internal twoship and cultural multitudes and the backwater, hillbilly Illuminati to which they probably belonged; or Mako’s desire to slip away to other places that he didn’t understand, his feeling of always being different and silly and kind of crazy and whether or not that ran in his family like Nana Victoria and Great Aunt Molly used to say, would some other place medicate his insanity and make it bearable to him, was it normal to feel always like his head would fly right off of his neck trying to keep up with the thoughts that ran around inside of it; or the past, the past, the past. 

“You know, last year when we were reading  _ Julius Caesar _ , I was reading this book about ancient methods of torture,” Mako said one night, speaking into the dark of Jem’s room after he and Jem had tried for about twenty minutes to go to sleep before abandoning the pretense and going back to just yakking it up without seeing or looking at each other, just feeling their bodies warm beside each other in the bed. “The Persians, I think, used to like, put people in-between in logs that had been hollowed out and like, force-feed them honey and milk and then also cover them with honey. They’d put them out on stagnant water and wait for the person to shit themselves, after which bugs would start eating their feces and all the honey on them and like, basically devour them alive, and burrow into their skin to breed and shit. They’d take days to die, and it would be agonizing.”

Jem made a soft noise of horrified acknowledgement. “That’s savage.”

“Talk about it. And then there was the Chinese, who would slowly cut a person all over their body until they eventually bled to death or had some vital part of their body removed. Death by a thousand cuts. And then there was hanging, drawing, and quartering by the English, where a person would be hanged nearly to the point of death, then castrated, then disemboweled, then beheaded, then chopped into four pieces.”

“Wouldn’t they have died by the time they were disemboweled, thus making beheading and quartering them completely obsolete?”

“I think the beheading and the quartering part was meant to be symbolic, like, you fucked up so bad we’re still torturing you after you already  _ died _ , bro. Don’t rest in peace – rest in  _ pieces _ .”

Jem laughed, then turned over in bed and began to reach for something in the dark. Despite it being his own bed and despite him favoring sleeping as close as possible to the window, he gave Mako the window side of the mattress because he has never not been selfless almost to the point of it being pathetic. There was silence, some clattering and tapping noises, and then music began to play from the bedside stereo: wistful, longing guitars; “ _ I want to hold the hand inside you. _ ”; his CD mixtape for the summer. 

Mako, who’d been looking at the blinds and the ominous shadow of the tree that lingered beyond them, slid his gaze over to the whorls in the wooden ceiling, which appeared almost grayscale in the dark. “Isn’t it weird how we’re obsessed with ways of hurting each other? How we actually devote creative energy to coming up with new, almost beautiful ways of doing it?”

“You think torture is beautiful?”

“No, not in reference to other things. It’s not like art or even science. But like, by its own standards, you could call it creative, and isn’t that beautiful?”

Jem was quiet for a few seconds. Mako could see and feel him trying to get comfortable – felt the shift of weight against the mattress, the momentary brush of a bare knee against his thigh covered by mesh gym shorts. When he spoke, it was to say, “By that logic, you could kind of call anything beautiful, right? If you held it up by itself. But you can’t hold anything up by itself. Everything’s connected.”

“Why are we talking about this?” 

“I don’t know, bro, you brought it up.”

“Okay, like… think about what kind of tortures we could come up with now that we know about medical science.” Mako folded his arms beneath his head. “I could like, strum your arteries and veins like guitar strings with some super gentle pick thing, hard enough so you could feel it and be uncomfortable, but not hard enough to sever the blood vessels. I could induce appendicitis, probably. I could take out your liver and transplant in a liver from someone with an incompatible blood type or whatever and watch your body reject the new liver and refuse to give you a new one, and then you’d die of septic shock because your body wouldn’t be able to filter out toxins anymore.”

“How do you know all of this? Have you been thinking about this? Was your ninth grade biology class back in Bumfuck, New Zealand just like, really in-depth?”

“I used to want to be a doctor when I was little.” Mako exhaled a world’s worth of air through his mouth. “My mum bought me this book all about the human body. I memorized it. ‘ _ The liver’s prime task is handling all the nutrients and substances digested from the food you eat and sending them out to your body cells when needed. It clears the blood of old red cells and harmful substances such as alcohol, and makes new plasma. _ ’ That’s from the book. I was quoting it.”

Jem sat up; Mako could see nothing but the other’s silhouette, but he could tell he was being looked at, stared at in a way that was disbelieving and a little amazed. “You’re like… Rain Man,” Jem said.

“I’m  _ really _ bad at math,” Mako uttered with a chuckle. “Go ahead, ask me something.”

“Ask you what?”

“Like, a math question.”

“What’s seven times thirteen?”

“I don’t fucking know.” They both laughed, shaking the bedframe until it squeaked.

“Tell me something about the heart.”

“‘ _ Each side of the heart has two chambers. There is an atrium at the top where blood accumulates from the veins, and a ventricle below which contracts to pump blood out into the arteries. Both the left and the right heart eject about a third of a cup of blood with every beat. _ ’”

Jem shook his head as he laid back down at Mako’s side. There was his warm breath, sighed and half-blown against the side of Mako’s face. “Wicked.”

On the last Friday before school started up again, they walked through Wellington with Tatum, Quick, and Loren. From Blaise’s house near Lyall Bay to the Wellington Zoo and its zoological gardens, they picked their way down the hot sidewalks – Quick on a skateboard, holding Loren’s hand so he’d be less likely to spill over and fall; Loren, Mako, and Tatum all hickey-speckled and happy; Jem passing sticks of spearmint gum out to everyone, strolling along the rear of the formation behind Mako and Tatum as they held hands and occasionally leaned in to whisper or kiss each other. It was an afternoon on which life seemed good – better than okay, at least, and far enough out of the neighborhood of bad that it was easy to forget the shittier side of town even existed – on which Mako felt like a real life person with a brightish future, a girlfriend, and a fantastic social niche even as his head spun the way he and Jem talked about after dark; even as his soul’s bones grumbled as they grew against his skin, asking for more room, aching in their marrowy insides. 

They sat together in front of the lion enclosure, watching a small pride sun themselves and sleep at 3:45 PM. “Braid my hair for me, kid,” Tatum said to Mako, squatting on the ground between his legs and passing him a rubberband taken from around her right wrist. Mako brushed a friendly honeybee away from her hair and briefly touched his fingers to Tatum’s face – fingers that she reached up to hold against her cheek, her relishing the attention, the gentleness of it all. Loren, who sat on the bench alongside Mako with her legs astride Jem’s shoulders, cleared her throat.

“I have to tell you guys something,” she said. Mako looked at Jem, who looked at Quick, who looked at Mako. They all wore the same expression; it said, “Finally.”

“Me and Blaise–”

“Are sleeping together,” Quick finished before Loren could get all the words out. He threw his hands into the air. “Right? You’re sleeping together. Where’s my cookie?”

Loren cut her eyes at Tatum, looking not quite astonished. “Did you tell them?”

“I didn’t say anything!” Tatum cried with suspicious immediacy.

“Liar,” Mako said as he ran his fingers through Tatum’s tresses and felt the warmth of her body press into his inner thighs, dipping his head down to kiss the part he’d just made in the center of her head. Tatum reached around and slapped him gently on the face.

Loren made a small noise of frustration, cast her eyes up into the sky, and shook out her curls so that they fell loose and thick over her shoulders, which were uncovered by anything but the sapphire-colored spaghetti straps of her tank top and the visible hot pink straps of her bra underneath. “We’re not  _ sleeping _ together, guys,” she said. “We’re…  _ together _ together.”

For a lingering, almost horrible moment, nobody said anything. Mako threaded Tatum’s hair together into one long, pretty rope at the back of her head; Jem and Quick watched each other, sort of biting their lips and sort of searching for the right reply in each other’s eyes. It was, truth be told, unusual for Loren to be in this position in their collective friendship; usually, she was the one responding in the manner of emergency personnel to Tatum, Mako, or Quick’s inane bullshit, and she was always swift and always gentle and never faltered when it came to kindness or a much-needed, gentle critique. This was new, for Loren to implicitly ask for their opinions and their support; for Loren to be involved in anything that required a bona fide Conversation; for any of them to have to consider, and consider hard, the moral rightness of their actions, the implications and such. It wasn’t clearly cut; it didn’t make sense; they all stood in quicksand, wiggling around, holding one another’s hands and sure above all of the unpleasantness letting one another go would entail.

Understanding Loren the most of all of them – perhaps even more than Tatum did – Quick asked, “Are we going to be in the wedding?”

Loren rolled her eyes again and wagged her head back and forth. “We’re not getting  _ married _ .”

“Well, if you do get married, I’m the maid of honor,” Tatum put in as Mako rubberbanded the very tip of her braid. She gave Loren a silly, perfect smile. “I’m also your wedding planner, because I would totally rock that shit.”

“Tate…” Loren began to say, then trailed off when Mako leaned over and kissed her – briefly, so briefly as to almost not even count as a proper kiss at all but instead as a simple touching of lips – on the crest of her right cheek. She looked at him, wide-eyed with shock and wonder, and it all would have been so unbearable and so wrong if Jem had not followed Mako’s lead and brought the back of her hand to his mouth to kiss as well, if Quick had not followed right after and shot up from his place on the ground to dive in and peck Loren in the center of her forehead. Loren wasn’t a crier – not like Tatum, who wept at a hat’s drop – but her eyes were shiny as she looked around at all of her friends in their uneasy yet unambiguous acceptance of whatever was happening between her and their theatre teacher, their obvious love for her. She murmured, “Thank you.”

Mako, Jem, and Quick all nodded in unison. Tatum’s smile gleamed brighter: “Of course, bro,” she said.

Senior year began with a bang. Walking into last period Theatre IV on the second Monday of February, Mako, Tatum, and Jem were greeted by the following words on the whiteboard:

**SCIENCE FICTION DOUBLE FEATURE:**

**MACBETH** **, the illustrious and eerie tragedy**

**written by our good old boy,** **Willy Shakes**

**[insert drawing of Macbeth with a raygun]**

**Help yourself to a monologue** **@** **Blaise’s desk**

“ _ Yes! _ ” Mako cried out, fists thrown triumphantly into the air, then proceeded to dance all the way to Blaise’s desk, singing, “ _ Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes _ ,” all the while. 

“I guess somebody likes  _ Macbeth _ ,” Jem remarked drily. Tatum stifled her laugh in her hand.

“Gimme a Lady Macbeth,” she said as she reached Mako’s side and he began to rifle through the stack of monologues Xeroxed onto half-sheets of copy paper, him searching for “ _ I have almost forgot the taste of fears _ ” for himself. Together they tore through the pile of papers, some of them tumbling haphazardly to the floor, after which Jem would calmly pick them up and inspect them for his own use.

“Oh, the Porter’s monologue,” he commented after examining the third such paper to fall.

“It’s for Quick,” Tatum said without missing a beat.

Mako looked up from “ _ Is this a dagger which I see before me? _ ” to give Jem a somewhat apologetic look. “She’s right.”

“Quick fucking  _ owns _ that role,” Tatum added.

“Hey, hey,  _ hey _ , now!” came Blaise’s voice as he walked into the room, Loren close behind him. He approached his desk with an expression of mock-outrage and started plucking monologues out of Mako, Tatum, and Jem’s hands. “The point of this exercise is to be spontaneous, you little assholes. Spontaneity can’t occur if you’re all here cherry-picking what you’re going to read!”

“Oh, who gives a shit?” Tatum snatched the first monologue off the top of the reconstituted stack and smiled, tickled pink, when it turned out to be just what she’d wanted it to be: a Lady Macbeth. She scrunched her face up cutely at Blaise and said, “You’re just gonna cast us in all the main roles anyway because  _ you wuv us _ .”

Blaise stole a hand out and pinched Tatum’s jaws hard between his fingers. “You little shit.” He turned to Mako and handed him “ _ Was the hope drunk wherein you dress'd yourself? _ ”, said, “No half-assing it today. You earn what you get.”

Mako simply winked at his teacher and followed Tatum to their usual seats clustered near the back left corner of the room. “Long live the Wellington Teasippers!” he exclaimed.

Of course, in the end, Quick was given the Porter’s role.

Sitting on Blaise’s patio the afternoon after the cast list, having told their parents they were off to a pop rehearsal of sorts, the Teasippers drank nearly virgin pina coladas to the serendipitous, entirely expected turn casting had taken – to Loren the Weird Sister; Quick the Porter; Jem the Thane of Fife; Mako the ill-fated King of Scotland; and Tatum as his lovely, Machiavellian wife – while Blaise catalogue-shopped for raygun gothic, space agey costumes for the play. “I want something with big freakin’ shoulders for you, Mako,” he said, then, reaching out to touch the teenager’s face, thumb pressing briefly into the center of his bottom lip, asked, “How do we feel about silver lipstick, my dear?”

Mako grinned and looked at Tatum, who wore her smile and her dark, floral shift dress like she was in love. “The shinier the better,” he said.

It was Valentine’s Day on that lovely, almost floaty Friday night. Tatum’s mother and stepfather spent the evening out, wining and dining at The Larder. Mako’s mum, antagonistic to the spirit of a holiday as sentimental and, let’s be real, as feminized as this one, made it her mission to stay late at work grinding herself through the surplus of graded assignments and institutional paperwork she regularly found herself swamped with. Fortune thus having provided the opportunity, Mako and Tatum took the N1 and the N3 to her deserted house in Kelburn, where Mako laid in the center of her bed while she, like Jem, picked out her favorite music to put on the stereo. Where Jem’s tastes in the middle of the night ran to Mazzy Star and Coldplay, hers in the late afternoon ran to Aaliyah and Shelby Lynne. 

“Do you ever think you’ll end up in the States?” Tatum asked as she rose up and skipped barefoot over to the bed, throwing herself down next to Mako amidst the flourish of her long hair and the pulling of all her angular features into configurations that clearly telegraphed her curiosity. 

Mako instinctively reached out for her hand and smiled when she turned onto her side and threw her leg up over him, fitting their bodies together, her dress’ high hemline riding up and revealing her graphic puppy dog panties, them always aching to be touching in those days. “I don’t know,” he said. “Part of me wants to move to Mongolia and like, ride reindeers and train eagles. Or Hong Kong, where I can cook in some soul-crushing fast food place for the rest of my life.”

Tatum swept her hair out of her face with one hand and then put that hand down against Mako’s chest, rubbing him gently through the thin fabric of his muscle tee. Her brow furrowed and her lips pursed. “You want to have a soul-crushing job?” she asked.

“I feel like it just kind of makes sense.” Mako had a hard time understanding this answer himself – didn’t yet have the self-awareness required to comprehend his own inevitable impulse toward self-destruction and, in the most spiritual sense, rubbing himself raw against the harshness and the sandpaper grit of the world – so he shrugged instead of trying to explain his desires further. “Why? Do  _ you _ want to go to the States?”

“I don’t know.” Tatum’s hand – covetous, bored, unmistakably and thrillingly affectionate – drifted up to Mako’s collarbone and the hollow at the base of his neck. The touch of her fingers delighted him, and he almost purred in his pleasure. “There are a lot of things I want to do. I mean, my mum says it’s completely unrealistic, but I really want to keep doing this – acting – for the rest of my life. I want to write plays and make art and, I don’t know, once I get better at guitar maybe even record an album. And I know I can do all that here – there’s nothing really stopping me – but sometimes I just, feel, like, so intensely how far away we are from everyone and everything else except Australia, and Australia  _ sucks _ .”

“Australia does indeed suck.”

“My dad, when he was alive, had this one woman he was dating when I was like, eight. One day he woke up and she told him that she was gay, and then she moved to Australia. I remember thinking to myself how horrible she was for doing that – moving to Australia.”

Mako turned to look at Tatum and their noses touched. “Not for going gay?”

“No, bro.” Tatum’s expression carried within it hints of almost sarcastic glee. “That was cool as hell.”

Mako grinned and released an expansive breath of laughter. Tatum mirrored his expression and kissed him, their lips fitting together easily, their sweet warm exhale coming down through each other’s noses and tickling their faces. 

“Hey,” Mako murmured.

“Hi,” Tatum replied, just as quiet.

“I like you.”

A sliver of a smile: “I’ve gathered that.”

“No, I mean…” Mako sighed, wiggled onto his side so that he and Tatum’s bellies communed, the squiggly sounds of their digestion of lunchtime personal pan pizza and Twizzlers from Jem’s glove compartment in low conversation with one another. Tatum’s hand came up to cup his jaw and he turned his head to kiss its toasted brown palm, to lick into her head line until she laughed, tasting her salt and her sweat and her peculiar, human loveliness. He whispered, “I  _ really _ like you. You’re so cool,” because they were alone together and right then, as she always did, she made him calm, linear, tingly. She made him feel normal, more than anything, and this, he valued more than he’d ever admit. 

Tatum sunk her fingers into the lushness of his sheepy hair and sighed. “You’re cool, too,” she murmured, smirking. “Not as cool as me.”

“True.”

“ _ Mmmnh _ .” Her charm necklace tinkled as she leaned in closer to press her lips adorably to the tip of Mako’s nose. “I’ll take you to the States with me.” She kissed the skin just above his top lip. “We’ll go on tour together.” She moved to get him properly on the mouth. “We’ll do everything, and we’ll like, live in the middle of it all, you know? In the thick of it.”

“Deal,” Mako said, then kissed her back full on the lips, hard, until they began to roll around and wrestle for supremacy – her eventually ending the ordeal on top of him, straddling his hips and pushing her hands up beneath his shirt. In countless alternate universes, they could have ended up married, living with three kids, and writing folk music in a bungalow in Christchurch. There are still days when Mako laments the fact that they didn’t, Tatum being what she was and him being what he has always been: perfectly spoiled, not-quite complementary puzzle pieces, crybabies, too restless and weird to cope with anything and everything.

**Remember when Blaise got fired?**

**Oh,** **_fuck_ ** **, bro. That was the saddest week.**

**The Week of Tears.**

**Especially because his replacement had AIDS and could have dropped dead at literally any moment.**

**Mr. Meyboom didn’t have** **_AIDS_ ** **, Mako. He probably had cancer or, like, some kind of weird degenerative disease. He was probably just** **_old_ ** **, actually. That’s it. He was suffering with age.**

**You know what I always wonder, though?**

**What’s that?**

**Who told on Blaise and Loren? Because it wasn’t us, and I’m pretty sure Tate and Quick would have committed double seppuku before they did Loren like that.**

**I’ve always been convinced it was Esau. I know it’s weird and totally unfounded, but I just had a feeling that he saw something he wasn’t supposed to during** **_Virginia Woolf_ ** **and was like, “Yeah…** **_busted_ ** **, assholes.”**

**Fuckin’ Esau.**

**Fuckin’** **_Esau_ ** **.**

The Week of Tears came during September, after the electrifying heyday of  _ Macbeth _ – its glorious polyester shoulder pads, its haunted voices, its synth-heavy ‘80s soundtrack, and its rave reviews in some small local paper – and the less ostentatious but more emotionally satisfying production of  _ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? _ – during which the Teasippers ate burgers and French fries on Blaise’s dollar more than they would in any other period and spent so many afternoons rehearsing on his patio with thrift store furniture, shopping for costumes come out of the mid-1960s, blowing off their homework in favor of games of strip poker, senioritis set all the way in. When it began, there was no warning; Mako, Jem, Tatum, and Loren simply walked into class one Monday and there was the wrinkled husk of an old man, sitting at Blaise’s desk and poring with geologic slowness over the rollbook. 

They looked at each other, looked at the man.

The man offered them the gentlest of smiles, but said nothing.

“Where’s Mr. Peltier?” Tatum asked, strategically calm, uncomfortably formal, ponytail swinging as she made her way to her seat. 

The man’s face, already heavily creased, creased further as his expression gelled and he said, “That, my darling, I haven’t the faintest clue about. What I can tell you is that I’m Mr. Meyboom and that I’ll be your theatre teacher for the rest of the year.”

Mako felt, somehow, as though he’d been punched. He looked directly at Loren and saw her eyes wide and her mouth suddenly tight and thin. After class, they all piled into Jem’s car and used Quick’s flip phone to call Blaise; because it seemed right, Loren did the talking while everyone else clustered as tightly as they could around her to listen to Blaise’s replies.

The phone rang one, two, three, four times. Feeling a strange, heart-palpitating sort of anxiety that resembled the sheep death hysteria he’d once experienced in Raukokore, Mako reached around his shotgun seat to take Tatum’s hand and squeeze it a little, looked at the floor in the backseat and saw the muddy footprints he’d left there last spring on a rainy day. Tatum, who’d told him she’d loved him the previous week, rubbed her thumb over his and watched Loren’s face as a meteorologist watched a Doppler radar. The air in the car was stale, the texture of dry leaves when Blaise answered the phone, his voice soft and a little tinny to everyone but Loren’s ears: “Hello?”

“Hey, it’s Loren.”

“Oh, hey, baby. What’s up?”

“Well, we just got out of class.” Loren fidgeted with the hem of her corduroy skirt with the hand not holding Quick’s phone to her ear. “What’s going on? Did the school fire you, or what?”

Blaise didn’t say anything for a while. Mako didn’t know why, but he suddenly wanted to cry. Jem and Quick looked at each other with expressions that straddled the borderline of confused and just plain angry – Jem’s anger so unusual on a general level and so familiar to Mako in particular considering their history – while Loren ballooned outward, bigger and bigger until it seemed as though she might explode. 

Then, Blaise said in an unknown, cold voice, “I really can’t talk about it right now.”

Loren looked into Mako’s eyes. “You have been fired,” she said. “That’s what that means.”

“It means I can’t talk about it right now.”

“Don’t do that. Don’t, don’t, don’t act like I’m just some stupid kid you can’t trust to like, take things. What happened?”

“Baby, I really don’t want to have this conversation–”

“Is this my fault? Is this because of us?”

“Loren–”

Suddenly, there was a sharp rapping against the driver’s side window, sending everyone about two inches into the air and yanking them right out of the tiny rivulets coming out of Loren’s eyes, the swirling vortex forming in the center of the car. Blaise was talking, but they were all looking around trying to find the source of the disruption; when they found it, it was Esau and Rooney, walking past the Rabbit and laughing with stones in their hands.

“Now we’ll finally get the choice roles, eh?!” Esau cried, tossing another pebble against the car’s back bumper. Quick rolled down his window and stuck his head as far into the outside as it would go.

“Fuck off, you egg! You piece-of-shit knobhead!”

“Did you hear me, Lor?” Blaise asked. “Hello?”

Loren sniffed wetly, ground her palm into her running nose. “I’m sorry. Esau was– was being an arse.”

There was an airy noise over the line that could have been a sigh just as well as it could have been Blaise’s patio door  _ whoosh _ ing closed. “Look,” he said. “I need to go, okay? I’ll call you later.”

“But my house…!”

Dial tone. Silence. The Teasippers looked at one another, one by one, until Loren dropped the phone into her lap and abruptly produced a long, high wailing noise that seemed as an actual, physical blow to Mako, Tatum, Jem, and Quick.

“Oh,  _ fuck! _ ” Tatum released Mako to put her arms around Loren, her hand to the side of the girl’s face. As Loren openly wept – pushed for the first of many times that month to a sort of emotional breaking point that, again, was alarmingly unusual for her – Tatum pulled fingers carefully through her curls and said, “It’s okay. It’ll be fine! We’ll figure it out, eh? Together.”

Together.

Together was so easy, so deceptively, infuriatingly simple.

Mako’s breath caught, did not uncatch until Jem pressed a palm briefly to his left bicep and said, “Hey, mate.” They locked eyes – Jem’s, like Tatum’s, imbued with a meteorologist’s qualities. “Are you okay?”

Dismissively, Mako shook his head. “I’m fine,” he lied.

The next day, when Esau came to class, he was waiting.

“What’s that you said about choice roles, bro?” Mako asked upon Esau’s lonely, clueless approach to the classroom behind the auditorium. Esau was given no chance to respond before Mako was swinging for his head, making near-immediate contact with his pretty olive face and hurling him backward onto his ass with an audible  _ crack! _ With every kick landed, Tatum’s cries of a name like Mako’s grew louder, but to Mako, all was silent blank except for the color red. Except for some vertiginously high, screeching thing in the back of his head. Except for the shapes, everywhere, tessellating and rippling such that his skin audibly crawled. Except for Esau’s snotty, panting, screaming face getting pummeled beneath his left fist – and then there were arms hauling him up and away, dragging him by his backpack down the dimly lit hallway and into the outdoors.

He didn’t realize until the next day that Jem was the one who had broken up the fight.

“I had no idea,” he admitted to the other the following afternoon, when they sat in his backyard – day one into his week-long suspension – and Jem let him take sips from his Longest Drink in Town. “I couldn’t see anything. Or hear, for that matter. Or think.”

Jem frowned, scratching nervously at his right cheek. “Are you serious?”

“Yeah, I’m serious. It happens sometimes.” Mako said this evenly, almost casually, as if the instances in which he lost every tether to his own body and personal reality were not and had not always been the scariest things that he’d ever experienced in his life. The grass tickled his shins, his ankles; he took Jem’s drink and stuck its red plastic straw in his mouth, mumbling, “Thanks, though.”

“For what?”

“For stopping me, you know. Before things got out of hand.”

Jem’s expression brimmed with pity and amusement. Mako didn’t quite like it, but strangely enough, he felt no antipathy toward his friend. “I think things were out of hand the second you swung at him.”

“True.”

“Blaise  _ was _ fired.” Saying this, Jem tore a clump of grass out of the ground and paused at the sound of a car passing down the street in front of the house, Ace of Base playing loudly out of its rolled down windows. “Apparently the school had a… like, a hearing yesterday, and he was charged with inappropriate conduct with a student. Tate told me.”

“Loren’s legal, though,” Mako bleated.

“Doesn’t matter. She’s his student.” Jem gazed briefly at the sky, his face momentarily warped by sheepishness. “Sorry.  _ Was  _ his student.”

A moment of mourning passed between them. Mako handed Jem his milkshake, and the boy sucked its thick, strawberry goodness up into his mouth, watching Mako as if he feared the other might fracture without his continued watching, his oh so affectionate observation. There existed in both of their minds a sense that the illusion of carefree adolescence their collective relationship with Blaise had helped them to cultivate existed no longer, and that while they – particularly Loren – were being protected by their authority figures as the teenagers they were, they had in fact somehow become real adults somewhere between shadowcasting sexy musicals at midnight and sleeping beneath their theatre teacher’s cracked and intermittently leaking roof, side by side, kissing each other, acting like they knew everything about love and its making and most of all one another.

Mako laid down in the grass and closed his eyes. “I’m tired,” he said.

Jem made a soft, ambiguous noise before asking, “When did you go to bed last night?”

“Honestly? Nine o’clock. I slept all day, too.”

Jem said nothing, and Mako opened his eyes after a moment to find the boy just watching him, hair blowing a little in the wind, head a dark-winged angel’s beneath the blue late afternoon sky. It was the first time he’d known Jem was his best friend – because Jem had come to him that day without being asked to, because Jem was there and not demanding anything, not mad at him, had laid with him for so many nights that year and had simply been present – and because of this, Mako asked him to, “Lie down.” 

Jem did with no questions. A house-shaped cloud drifted laterally through the sky above, and together they sank into the ground as anchors did into the sea – ferrous, silent, and heavy, heavy, heavy.


	16. 16

#  _ 16 _

Two weeks after Mum’s last chemo session, she falls and breaks her hip. It’s not the funny kind of hip-break everyone likes to talk about – the punchline in some half-assed joke about old people, a rite of passage every elderly human must undergo, no – it is none of these things. Mako doesn’t see it happen. He is too busy napping in the middle of the day – succumbed, as he is so wont to, to the sky-bending fatigue that comes with his neurochemical imbalance and the particularly exhausting state of his life at this point in it. One moment, he is floating in REM, wandering deeper into a kaleidoscope vision of deep-sea terrors, dark eyes, vibrating blue, weightless tentacles; the next, there is Jem’s voice, shouting him awake like a siren.

“ _ Mako! _ ”

Mako’s eyes fly open, his entire body rigid as stone. The ceiling is hostile, the house feels wrong, and he is so confused, looking all around for Jem and finding the man nowhere. 

“ _ Mako! _ ”

This time, Mako can hear clearly that Jem’s voice is coming from outside the room. There are razor notes of panic in each syllable; fast enough to hurt himself, Mako flies out of bed in his underwear and T-shirt, tears open the bedroom door, and yells down the stairs, “Jem?!”

“Outside, outside! Your mum fell!”

Heedless of his partial undress, for the moment pure and simple instinct, Mako takes the stairs two at a time and steps out of the open front door onto the patio, where Jem is crouched over Mum and Mum is breathing hard, sprawled halfway on the cement, legs thrown out in opposite directions. She is completely bald, somewhat ashen, speckled with soil, and her face is contorted with pain.

“Oh, my God…” is all Mako can manage initially.

“Shit!” Mum swears, which, for some reason, makes everything slightly more real than it was before.

“Oh my God.” Mako moves to kneel by his mother’s side, hands going in all directions at once before finally settling on her stomach and the hip not crushed into the ground. “What happened?”

“I was gardening and I fucking  _ fell _ , that’s what happened.” Even helpless, hairless, and entirely at the mercy of her son, Mum abounds with fury. She starts to roll herself into an upright position, then releases a low hiss and cries, “Shit!” again.

Jem is a relatively calm presence at Mako’s side, asking, “Should I call for an ambulance?”

“No,” Mum says before Mako can answer, shaking her head and closing her eyes against her agony. She grasps Mako’s hand and, screaming a little, pulls herself up. “No ambulance. Pillows in the backseat of the car will do.”

Mako and Jem exchange a brief, intensely communicative look. They get Mum to her feet, her cursing and yelling all the while, and while Jem walks her in toddling, baby steps to the Jetta amidst her chorus of, “ _ Shit _ , motherfucker, fuck,  _ shit _ ,” Mako runs upstairs to pull a pair of blue jeans on and grab the soft pillows from the bed.

Because Mako cannot see anything save for flat, opaque shapes where road is supposed to exist, Jem does the driving, and for two hours, they all sit together in the emergency room at Oschner Baptist. Mako is calmer than he has any right to be, bringing Mum ice chips in a Styrofoam cup when the morphine drip gives her cottonmouth and sitting with his chair pulled right up next to her bed, rubbing her cranium through her silk headscarf, answering her questions.

“Where the hell is the doctor?”

“I don’t know.”

“You told your daughter where we were going, right?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you off to?”

“I’m going to get you more ice.”

“Are you going to look at me like that this whole time?”

“No.”

By the end of their second hour in the glass, curtained box that constitutes Mum’s room, after X-rays but before an actual diagnosis, Mum is asleep, snoring like a freight train without the aid of her CPAP machine. Jem sits on the doctor’s stool, alternating his attention between his phone and Mako. When, for maybe the fifteenth time in just as many minutes, he looks at Mako with the sorriest look Mako has probably ever seen on his face, Mako tries to smile at him and just ends up wearing a grotesque, profoundly ugly grimace.

“Yikes,” Mako says to himself. “That failed epically.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” Mako pulls his hand away from the smoothness of Mum’s scarf and sandwiches it between his thighs, squeezing his legs together tight, tight, tight until his palm begins to go numb. He exhales sharply through his nose. “I hate how she snores. It makes me feel like I want to kill myself.”

Jem scowls, not quite disapproving, not quite alarmed with worry. “Seriously?”

“Yeah. It’s like, the sound of it just makes me so, like,  _ angry _ and  _ tired _ . I’ve never been able to explain it. I just can’t stand to hear her snore.” The numbness spreads out to his fingers, tingling in his honeycomb knuckle-bones. “I can’t believe I give a shit about that right now.”

Jem pulls his glasses off of his face to rub the lenses clean with the hem of his T-shirt. “You’re human.” He raises his chin a bit. “How was your nap?”

Mako hangs his head until his chin touches his collarbone. The floor is devoid of dimension, the hospital air icy against the skin of his arms and his lips, which have begun in the past few days to chap. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know anything.”

Jem stands up and drags his stool over to Mako’s side of the bed. He leans in to kiss Mako on the flat, hair-covered plane of his left temple, but just as Jem’s mouth touches down, the glass door and polyester curtain of the room are being slid and swished open and the doctor – a thin slip of a woman with a vaguely Arabic accent, named Mahmoud – is stepping inside, holding a clipboard. She doesn’t waste any time.

“Your mother has cancer of the breast, yes?”

Mako nods as Jem pulls back a respectful, tactful distance. “Yeah. She just got finished with chemo.”

“And she hasn’t had her post-treatment assessment yet?”

“No.”

Dr. Mahmoud’s mouth pulls down into a soft, factory-issued sort of frown that looks as though it has seen much wear. “The cancer may have metastasized. We found a mass in her right hip joint. Nothing’s certain yet, but…” Her right shoulder rises up into a shrug that may be noncommittal, may be grudgingly apologetic – Mako can’t quite tell. “We’ll probably have to admit her.”

Mako blinks. “You mean… keep her?”

“Yes. At least until we have a better idea of what’s going on – two days at the longest.” Mahmoud approaches Mum’s bed, and abruptly, Mako is taken by the urge to lunge in and throw the woman to the ground, away from his mother. He doesn’t move. Dr. Mahmoud begins to shake Mum awake. “Ms. Nuhgata? Ms. Nuhgata? Hi. I’ve just had a look at your X-rays.”

Within the next hour, they are wheeling Mum to her room in the oncology ward in the main hospital and Mum is nice and high on IV pain medication. After Mako and a big, burly nurse that reminds him uncomfortably of Cassidy have lifted Mum into her new high-tech, remote-controlled bed – them groaning, her laughing, the afternoon sun filtering in through the window the color of honey – Mum reaches for Mako’s face and says, “Mako?”

“Yeah, Mum?”

“There you are. You’re right here. Always right here. I remember when you came back to Wellington. To the house. You’re my only one.” There are her fingers, tracing down into the pillow of his cheek, through the short hairs of his beard and to the underside of his chin. Her eyes dance in her analgesia and her face is filled to brimming with love. “Aren't you?”

Mako has never seen her look this way before. It is unreal and almost too much to stand. The last time he saw anyone look like this, in fact – so full of unadulterated affection for him to the point of wholesale ignorance of the rest of the world, the ghosts winding themselves into odd shapes along the ceiling, the hyperphysical fury of living – Nana Victoria had laid in her California king and opened her arms wide so that he, sixteen years old, could come crawling right into them just as he’d done throughout his childhood, because loving didn’t stop just because someone got too old for it, though Mum had always been disinclined to agree with this sentiment. What would Mum agree with now, he wonders. What would she say if she was anything but floating on a sweet opium cloud? He says, “If you say so.”

“If you say so!” Mum exclaims with a laugh. Her hand is petting down his neck to his chest now, pressing into the plasticized orca glued to the yellow cotton of his shirt. “I’m your only one, too. You’re my only one, my only… my only, only one.”

Mako leans in and brushes a kiss over her forehead, something in his stomach with teeth and an alkaline tongue, eating at him. He sits with his head in her hand, face-down on the sliver of mattress left by her side with her fingers pushing themselves slowly through the thickness of his hair, until it’s seven o’clock and the sky is some weird pink lemonade color and he needs to be getting home to feed his daughter. On the way home, he and Jem stop at the McDonald’s reeking incessantly of cooking oil on St. Claude and pick up a Quarter Pounder, a Filet-o-Fish, ten-piece chicken nuggets, and three medium orders of room temperature French fries. Mako eats this gross, deeply satisfying dinner with his family and then goes right back to bed, where – approximately fifteen minutes after he has laid down, in the early evening darkness of a room unlit by lamps – Jem finds and curls his body around him, hands on his stomach and chest, mouth pressing over and over and over into the back of his head.

“I love you so much,” Jem whispers. This, of all things, is what undoes him.

“I love you, too,” Mako replies, and his body is an earthquake, him crying out into the fast-approaching night, missing his darling mommy.

He falls into darkness and sleeps fitfully, waking up every other hour to kick his pants off, check the time, use the bathroom, turn over to face Jem. The fourth time he wakes, his phone is ringing and it is 3:38 in the morning. When he looks at the screen, it is shining  _ robbie gehringer  _ at him alongside a baby picture of his elder sibling in yellow overalls, sucking on an ice pop and half-scowling into the camera. Mako glances at Jem – sleeping soundly, face smushed into the pillow – and, suddenly almost poisonous with envy, with exhausted, acidic resentment, slides his thumb across his iPhone’s touchscreen to answer the call.

“It’s three-thirty in the morning.”

“Oh, fuck.” Robbie’s voice is choked and wet over the line, and while this is generally quite evocative of Mako’s sympathy, it does nothing to temper his utter longing to be anything but on the phone right now. Robbie coughs, sniffles loudly, and asks, “Were you asleep? You were asleep, weren’t you?”

Mako puts his face down into his pillow. “Signs point to yes.”

“What did you say?”

Mako raises his head again and begins to get out of bed. “I’m asleep right now, having this conversation.”

“Is it– is it okay if I talk to you? I really need to talk to you and like, Roz is out with this guy, this stockbroker, and Don is with his parents in Auckland, and Rainbow is like, so fucking mad at me right now over  _ Twitter _ bullshit–”

“Great.” Mako makes his way downstairs, past Stevie sleeping at the bottom of the steps and into the dark, lukewarm cave of the kitchen. “So I’m your fourth-string shoulder to cry on.”

“You’re being kind of mean right now.”

“I’m sorry.” Mako isn’t sorry. He’s flicking the lights on and taking a glass out of the cabinet above the sink, turning on the faucet and filling his glass with coolish water. He doesn’t want to know – he’d rather go sit in the middle of the street and wait for some bass-booming Crescent City car to come and finish him off, truth be told – but because he’s sometimes a nice person who doesn’t want the people in his life to suffer, still he asks, “What’s wrong?”

“I’m losing my mind. I don’t know what to do.” The moist, sickening noise of mucus being sucked through nostrils, then continued speech, hysterically high notes. “I’m fucking sick, first of all. Like  _ literally _ sick – I’ve had this shitty head cold for like, two weeks, goddammit,  _ fuck _ central air conditioning – but I’m also so, so fucking sick in the head. There is nothing about me that is right or functional or okay and it, it –  _ God _ , Mako, I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I’m forty-two. Forty-two! Why don’t I have, like, a spouse and a mortgage and a kid right now? Because I’m fucked up. I’m  _ so _ fucked up. Did you know that the last time I told someone I loved them, I was drunk?”

“Wow, that’s–”

“I’m awful! I’m fucking crazy, and stupid, and  _ awful! _ I haven’t told you about Aubrey, have I?  _ God _ , okay – buckle up, you ready? I met Aubrey last month. Roz and I went to get our hair done for Valentine’s Day; we like, were gonna have a day together because I’m single and she’s divorced and like  _ hell _ were we spending this year alone. Pathetic, right? And the guy who does my hair, he’s like,  _ not _ attractive – he’s really big and he has this gross belly and he’s, of all fucking things, a  _ ginger _ . He’s practically translucent, that’s how pale he is. But he’s funny, you know? He made me laugh. That’s a hard thing to do – everybody’s so fucking boring, so, so conventional,  _ ugh _ . Not him. He told me this story about like, how he used to leave open cans of tuna fish on his nan’s bookshelves so her house would smell awful because he didn’t like her, and about how  _ Forrest Gump _ – the movie – was based on a book that was so much crazier and so much darker than Robert fucking Zemeckis made it out to be. I don’t know, I feel like I just explained that really badly. I like him, though. He tells me he’s named Aubrey, and I like that, too. I used to think Aubrey was a girl name, like Audrey – it’s very genderfluid, very queer – so I thought that was a good sign. Plus he told me that he was a Taurus, and I  _ love _ Tauruses. I’ve only ever been in love with Tauruses. We start hanging out. You remember Fidel’s, right? That’s the first place we go, the day after Valentine’s. He ordered that halloumi on toast thing – that, like, toast thing with halloumi cheese and avocados and chili jam – and a Bloody Mary. A Bloody Mary! I remember, I said, ‘You’re going kind of fast here, bro’ – not meaning anything by it, but you know how I just, flirt without thinking, the words just kind of fall out of my mouth – and he laughed and he smiled and said, ‘I’m just thirsty. Are  _ you _ thirsty?’ What am I supposed to say to that but, ‘Of course!’? There was just something about him. The Greek cheese. The Bloody Mary. Remember when I met Rainbow and she was carrying these super yonic flowers and I just said, ‘Ah! Like, where have you been all my life?’ It was like that with Aubrey. I took him to look at art at the Dowse. He painted my nails and read my palms. I think he was just bullshitting but it was nice, like – it was the thought he put into it, the fact that he wanted to make me smile. By week two, I’m smitten, but I don’t think I can handle being in another relationship after Rainbow and Theo and He Who Must Not Be Named, but I can also tell that Aubrey like, wants me  _ bad _ . I have fucking  _ magnetism _ . So I say, ‘We can fuck, but we have to stay friends, okay? We can even be best friends if you want.’” Robbie pauses to make a short, snuffling noise, then says, “So we start sleeping together. And it’s fine, because we still act the same as we did before. We still go to museum shows and drink at The Welsh Dragon and like, have sleepovers, but they’re  _ sexy _ sleepovers now, not just  _ sleepover _ sleepovers. The thing is, we’re like two weeks into this thing now and I think I’m in love with him, because I can’t stop thinking about him and I’m like, imagining us living together in Pipitea, and I only did that with Rainbow, and I’m like that fucking deer in  _ Bambi _ after it grows up and it’s springtime and it’s like, hopping all over the place in perfect Technicolor. It’s disgusting. And now I’m acting all weird and like, giving him mixed messages. Three days ago I got smashed on Crown Royal and I called him at two in the morning and I was like, like, ‘You’re like a song and my soul is feeling so musical’ or some such shit, and then the next day I didn’t remember saying it at all until he called me back at noon and told me about it! And it was true, is the thing. I wasn’t lying. But I told him, ‘Oh, I was just drunk’ so now he thinks I didn’t mean it, but I did mean it. I only mean things when I’m drunk. Maybe I should be drunk all the time – do you think I would be a better person if I was an alcoholic? Do you think people would like me better? I think  _ I _ would like me better. And I don’t know what Aubrey is thinking because he doesn’t tell me, he’s like,  _ funny _ . You know how funny people are never honest about their feelings? Because they’re always making jokes about them? That’s how he is. He joked that we would get married one day and it broke my heart, but I had to just laugh about it. I don’t know what to do. I’m so tired.”

Now there is a prolonged moment of silence. Mako, who has progressed from standing in the kitchen to lying on the sofa in the living room – face turned up toward the ceiling, glass of water on the floor next to him, eyes closed – simply breathes into the mouthpiece of his phone, counting the seconds of quiet, the miles stretching topographical shades of green and blue between him and Robbie. 

Robbie sniffs, the sound a little deafening to Mako’s ears. “Are you there?”

“Oh, yeah, I was just–” Mako coughs, raises momentarily up into a sitting position to take a sip from his water. “I was just making sure you were done.”

“Well? Do you have any thoughts?”

“I don’t know.”

A beat. “You don’t have  _ any _ thoughts of  _ any _ kind?”

This question triggers a fury in Mako that would make his mother proud. “Well, I don’t fucking know, Robbie. It’s three-thirty in the morning and my mum has metastatic breast cancer for which she’s currently being kept at the hospital. Maybe I’m a little distracted.”

“Oh, shit…” Robbie, for some reason, starts laughing, and it’s almost enough to have Mako lobbing his phone across the room and going the fuck back to bed (or spontaneously melting into dark, enraged goop – either works). “I am so, so sorry, dude. Why didn’t you say anything?”

“It’s three-thirty in the morning!” Mako cries, slightly hysterical.

“You mentioned that.”

“I’m not even  _ thinking _ , Rob! I can’t think about anything except Mum in–” He breaks off into an unanticipated, choking sob; brings a hand up to cover his face, his abrupt weeping, his asthmatic breath catching on every ridge along the inside of his throat. He’s been doing so much crying nowadays, he isn’t sure how he managed to catch himself off guard, unready for the ungodly boohooing with a palm in which to catch his tears and a hole to crawl into and hide. 

“Fuck, are you crying?” Robbie asks. “Oh, no. No, no, no, no. It’s okay, mate. You’ll be fine.”

“No, I won’t,” Mako blubbers wetly.

“Why didn’t you… why didn’t you call me? Ezra didn’t tell me anything.”

“Ezra doesn’t fucking know. Nobody back home knows.” 

“Why? Why wouldn’t you tell anybody?”

“ _ Rob _ …” Mako, dribbling snot onto his upper lip, grinds a hand up into the place below his nose and shakes his head at nothing in the dark. “You’re not really making me feel better.”

“I’m sorry,” Robbie says, and somehow – through their upper respiratory congestion and the perpetual gloss of self-absorption lying over their anything and everything – they sound like they actually mean it. “I told you, dude, I’m an awful person.”

“Yeah, well I believe you,” Mako says, then – because it’s absurd, because this conversation is at once the most and least expected one he could be having with Robbie at this time on a Sunday morning – laughs, the sound just kind of bursting out of him through the gaps in his fingers.

“Do you want to like, talk about it?”

“No, I don’t. In fact, I want to not talk about it for the rest of my life, until I’m on my deathbed and I’m racked with guilt and Kory – because Jem’s going to die before me, I just know it – has to deal with me crying nonstop in the last days of my life, crying all about Mum.”

Robbie giggles. “I feel like we both walk around with the assumption that  _ I’m _ the dysfunctional sibling, but you’re pretty up there too, my friend.”

“It’s those Ezra Gehringer genes.”

“Are you saying that emotional constipation is genetic?”

“I’m saying please, for the love of God, shut up.” Mako sips again from his water and watches Stevie amble blindly into the kitchen, tailtip twitching from side to side with her every step. Sometimes, it takes telling himself to realize that he does, in fact, love Robbie; this makes the love itself no less valid.

They wrestled as kids. Their parents called it “boy stuff” – just the clockwork, entirely expected urges and accompanying behavior of male children. Little did these parents know that Robbie was never exactly a  _ male _ child, that when they (at the time gendered he) shoved the heel of his right hand into Mako’s left cheek and ground the boy down into the ground, screaming, it was an act of loving aggression rather than masculinity, an expression of his supremacy as the older sibling and the alpha dog in his and Mako’s relationship, of his status as a big and bad Aquarius ascendant, of his desire for superiority in all aspects of his life. They watched scary movies, too. They ran, hollering, through Ezra’s house when the old beech in the front yard scraped its branches against the living room window in the dark of the night. They went to bed at 10:00 and fell asleep three hours later, having talked themselves out on conversations about weird shit like the purpose of eyebrows and the hypothetical sex and gender castes of intelligent aliens and what did God look like, if It looked like anything at all. They smoked kreteks filched from Ezra’s upper left desk drawer in the garage on Sundays, and like most of the things they did together, it wasn’t quite clear whose idea it was – perhaps Robbie had suggested it and Mako had hopped right on board, or maybe Mako had wanted to try it and Robbie had promised to make his dreams come true. Nobody knew, and truthfully? Nobody cared, either. 

“Stop doing that!” Robbie hissed as Mako hacked himself raw, doubled over his knees while they sat in Ezra’s station wagon. It was four in the morning; it had taken that long to wait for Ezra to go to bed and then implement their plan, sneaking around and out of the house on tiptoe so as to not wake their father. Robbie, fifteen at the time, smoked like a pro despite this having been his first time. “You’re not supposed to suck on it!”

“I’m not  _ sucking _ on it.” Mako, who was eleven, slipped the clove cigarette between his lips with a hand that trembled. He allowed spiced smoke to accumulate along the roof of his mouth and in the back of his throat for long seconds before letting the vapor slip out slow and translucent, floating up into the station wagon’s hard felt ceiling. He coughed again. “Oh my God.”

Robbie grinned and cackled. “What a baby.”

“I’m  _ not _ a baby.”

There came Robbie’s hand, fingers curling teasingly beneath Mako’s chin. “Does the wee little baby need a glass of water? Is it too much for him?”

Mako, feeling as cruel as he often did in his sibling’s presence, reached over and ashed his cigarette over Robbie’s arm. When red sparks flew off and hit Robbie’s bare skin, the elder of them shrieked and flailed hard enough to blow the car horn. Mako punched him in the shoulder. “Stop it! You’ll wake Dad!”

“Daddy’s  _ out _ , dude.” Robbie flapped the hand not holding his cigarette around glibly in the air. “Don’t even think about him. If you think about him, you’ll send psychic energy in his direction and he’ll feel it and  _ then _ he’ll wake up.”

Mako looked at Robbie long and hard, eyes boring into the side of his head until the other looked at him. He scoffed. “You’re so weird.”

_ Lion King _ -conscious since 1994, Robbie immediately deadpanned, “You have no idea.”

It was the first of several years of surreality. Smoking in the garage in the wee hours started in January. In February, Robbie told Mako that the world lived in his head – what a vivid imagination he had indeed – and that while he’d lived in a waking dream for so many years, what was really real existed outside of his coma. “Wake up, Mako,” Robbie would whisper into the bathroom when Mako brushed his teeth before bed. “Wake up! We miss you!” In March, the  _ Blade Runner _ shit started: the leaving of plastic sharks from vending machines in Mako’s bedsheets; the strange trances Robbie would go into during dinner time, frothing at the mouth and seizing a little and going, “ _ Wake up! Wa-wa-wake up! _ ”; the examination of the constellation of moles on Mako’s back for oracular details of his “real” life – Robbie  _ hmm _ ing and saying, “Your mum’s a starship captain. She had you in space, so now you have all these weird allergies and sicknesses. That’s why you’re asleep, because you’re sick. Sleeping sickness.” With April came Passover, and with Passover came the elderly relatives from Ezra’s side of the family, sitting tall and proud in all of the wooden armchairs and telling stories of the Warsaw Ghetto and Treblinka, miraculous escapes and rescue missions, excoriating hunger that called for eating snow right off of the dirty Polish ground, children starved to death and left to perish on the streets. In the midst of all the solemnity, Robbie wore lipstick, rouge, and his mother’s old dress – a form-fitting, hippy number of burgundy velvet with spaghetti straps, with dark jacquard flowers, with a ruffled hem that inflamed Ezra’s quiet rage and had him sending the boy upstairs to, “Change into something more appropriate, for heaven’s sake. And take all that damn makeup off your face.”

Instead of doing as he’d been told (for he’d always been frankly shit at this), Robbie got in the closet with Mako.

“What are you doing in here?” he asked, folding his long, lanky body up beside his brother’s on the floor, avoiding the shoeboxes full of yellowed, old receipts Ezra kept in there. Mako had been sitting cross-legged on the carpet with his dictionary, reading from  _ entity _ to  _ entomb _ to  _ entomology _ to  _ entourage _ . 

“I don’t like it when Papa talks about the Holocaust,” Mako said. He dog-eared his page and scratched beneath the collar of his button-down, which had been passed down to him from Ezra and which he hated as he hated everything in Wellington. “Every time he gets to Baby Sarai I have to dip.”

“ _ Ugh _ , Baby Sarai.” Baby Sarai was Papa Benjamin’s first child, who he’d abandoned in Warsaw to die shortly after the creation of the ghetto in 1940. She was the low point of every Passover, Mako had come to realize, and he’d heard her story so many times and felt enough secondhand guilt for her disownment to last him probably a whole lifetime and then some. Robbie crossed his freckled arms across his knees, which he held up to the flat of his chest. His response to the matter was considerably more flippant than Mako considered his own to be: “I’ve heard the story so much that by this point, it’s just white noise to me.”

Mako frowned. “It doesn’t make you sad?”

“What’s to feel sad about? Papa had a baby and he left that baby to die in a time when everyone, everywhere, was dying. It happened a million years ago.” Robbie shrugged. “I don’t know why we have to all get together and pool our bad feelings every year at the same time. Why do Jews do that, huh? All our special occasions are just about feeling bad.”

“That’s not true. Dad says that Passover is a celebration.”

“Tell that to all the old people in the lounge.” Robbie started to lean back against the wall of the closet, but underestimated the distance between himself and said wall and thus fell hard into it, his stilettoed foot flying out and up in the process. Mako’s frown deepened.

“Why are you wearing that? Does your mum know you’re wearing that?”

“You know, I’m so tired of all these inane questions,” Robbie uttered with a sigh. “‘ _ Why are you wearing that? Does your mum know about it? _ ’ My mum doesn’t know anything about anything! And I can wear whatever I want, just because I  _ feel _ like it!”

“So you feel like a girl?”

“For the moment, yes.” Robbie flicked his long, intensely curly hair away from his face and smiled with a blood red mouth. Doing this made him look like an Audrey Hepburn,  _ Breakfast at Tiffany’s _ movie star, which Mako loved, not that he’d ever admit it.

“Dad told you to change, didn’t he?”

“Dad can sit on it and spin. I’m  _ not _ changing. I feel good about myself. I won’t be made to feel bad about feeling  _ good _ .” This spiel, though partially the product of wine diluted with water and drunk by the quart when Robbie had lurked around downstairs in the preceding hour, was a motto of sorts – the encapsulation of Robbie’s personal truth, the singular tenet of his existence. The fact that he’d articulated it so clearly at the tender age of fifteen might have been impressive to Mako if Mako had had any kind of perspective; because Mako didn’t, though, it just came across as strangely inspirational.

Mako looked at Robbie – the dark curlicues of his hair, waxy buildup of red on his lips, velvet flowers on his dress shining a little in the saffron light inside the closet. He was his brother, a girl, and at seder he sat next to him in all his female finery, reciting the four questions, eating the matzo and maror, stealing the afikoman and holding it for ransom, drinking the third and fourth (and the unsanctioned fifth and sixth) cups of wine. Sometimes, like on the Passover of 1998, Mako didn’t mind his dream life all that much. Sometimes, it was fun – even funny – when he understood Robbie with a particular, almost supernatural keenness; when time passed and the world turned and it was not all inordinately scary for doing so. 

The second year of surreality saw a growth spurt on Mako’s part and Robbie’s first “real” relationship, which was enacted via phone calls with a boy who’d once gone to his school in Wellington but had since moved to Rotorua. The fourth year, Robbie moved out of his mother’s house and talked incessantly about his flatmate Don whenever he visited Ezra and Mako on the weekends – a feat he always undertook while under great pressure from Miss Shanna to “humor [his] father and give, for once, at least one shit about [his] brother.” On the sixth year of surreality – the year of  _ Macbeth _ , of the firing of Blaise Peltier – Mako sometimes sat in his father’s backyard on the weekends in the winter; bundled up in his big striped sweater with the cat’s eyes, whiskers, and nose on it; wrapped himself in a blanket cocoon fashioned from the quilt taken from Robbie’s old bunk (at the time newly his bunk); and talked to his elder sibling on the phone while watching the watercolor Wellington sky shift and bend and turn as the hours slipped by.

“I’m so lazy, bro.”

“Not as lazy as me.” Robbie, a week and a half out of his twenty-first birthday, on some hotel room phone in Auckland where he and his university friends were celebrating their winter break, produced his customary, Wicked Witch of the West sort of laugh. “Are you so lazy you put off your dental and eye appointments for a year and then ended up with a cavity and no contact lenses  _ and _ broken glasses all in the same week? And you  _ still _ didn’t make your appointments?”

“That’s not laziness. That’s more like, procrastination.”

“I don’t see the difference, dude.”

“Ezra asked me to clean my room like three hours ago and instead of doing that I’m sitting out in the backyard talking with you.” Mako sighed and followed an airplane’s arcing path across the heavens with his eyes. “I actually feel like I’d rather die, like,  _ violently die _ , than do anything else.”

“Aw, that’s sweet. Aw, you really love me.”

“ _ Love _ you?  _ Ew _ .” Even saying this, Mako could not help but chuckle, hiding his face in his right shoulder so that Robbie wouldn’t hear him. At the moment, his existence felt tired and dreamy – threaded through with gossamer, floating on an island in some remote corner of the universe – and the day fell around him in cold sheets of blue, purple, and white. He remembered that he was fake, and just then, the sentiment brought him comfort. 

“You stole my black nail polish, didn’t you?” Robbie asked.

Mako glanced down at his hand peeking out from beneath a blanket fold and sitting limp in his lap, the bits of sparkling black chipping off of his nails. He curled his fingers beneath his palm. “No.”

“Yes, you did, you little shit. I couldn’t find it when I was packing and you’re the only one who knows where my stash is. Well, you and Roz.” There was a soft clinking over the line, then Robbie exhaled audibly, a little irritably. “I was gonna wear that polish tonight. We’re going to this dance spot called Club Kong and I need to complete my like, my ‘80s glam-goth Cher look.”

“Why would you want to go ‘80s Cher when ‘70s Cher is so much more accessible?”

“It’s not about accessibility!” Robbie shrieks. “It’s about iconography, and ‘80s Cher is a friggin’  _ icon _ , okay?!”

“Okay! Jesus!”

“Okay!” Abruptly, without pausing between sentences: “Can I tell you something?”

Mako settled down in his wooden lawn chair, curled his legs up beneath him. “Yeah.”

“Don’t… don’t tell Ezra.”

Mako looked up at the house behind him, the window in Ezra’s office, the lamplight shining dimly behind its translucent floral curtains. He’d never planned on telling Ezra any of the things he and Robbie spoke of; he said, feeling a little anxious, “Okay.”

Robbie was quiet for seconds that seemed to last hours. For him to say nothing made no sense, defied the laws of the universe, among them gravity, inertia, and the constant running of Robin Gehringer’s mouth. After a small forever, he cleared his throat and uttered in a voice softer, lower than the one he normally used, “I think I’m transgender.”

This was a word Mako had never heard before and for which he had minimal frame of reference. He examined the context clues at his disposal. “Do you mean… do you mean you’re like… a tranny?”

“First of all, that’s a very bad word that you should never, ever say again lest you want me to fly directly to you and slap the shit out of you.” Robbie sounded much more like himself saying this; Mako permitted himself to breathe as normal. “Second of all,  _ yes _ . I am a tranny. I am incorrectly sexed. I don’t think, I  _ am _ .”

“Wow, uh…” Mako coughed nervously, uncomfortable with the abrupt seriousness of the conversation. He knew Robbie wanted him to say something, as always – this was one of the constants of their relationship, had been one since Mako turned fourteen and they’d begun to actually talk about things with each other. He said, “Well, I mean, that’s cool. Is it cool? Does it make you, uh, happy?”

At this, Robbie cackled freely. “Yes, it makes me happy, you fool!” he cried, voice soaring into all the upper octaves of amusement and brutal, egoistic glee. “That’s the point! Being happy, by myself, as myself! You’re so full of shit, Mako. Oh my God. You’re just, just, too  _ good _ –”

“What do you want me to say, Rob?” Mako asked, putting his face momentarily in his hand. “What do you want me to do? You’re my first brother to come out as transgender to me. I’m kind of at a loss here.”

“I’m not your brother,” Robbie pointed out, still laughing.

“Sister?”

“No. I’m not a man, I’m not a woman, I’m just…” Robbie sighed loudly, made a throaty, ambiguous sound. “Everything, all at once. I contain multitudes. Do you understand?”

Mako did. He thought he did, at least. He imagined the garden of pink, blue, and purple flowers growing inside of Robbie, the vines climbing up the trees and the Lisa Frank dolphins swimming in packs through a glitter, tempest-tossed sea. “Yes.”

“Thank you. Thank you so much, dude. That means a lot.”

“Do you want me to do anything?”

“Yes. Call me  _ they _ , okay? Not  _ he _ or  _ him _ .  _ They _ and  _ them _ . What did Robbie do? They went to the club dressed as ‘80s Cher. Did they have fun? Yes, they did. They danced, and they kissed all of the boys and all of the girls, and they were the bomb-diggity.”

Mako giggled into the back of his hand and snuggled himself deeper into his quilted cocoon. “That sounds easy.”

“You’d think it would be, but some assholes find it so fucking difficult, eh?” And then Robbie ranted about pronouns for the next ten minutes, after which Mako helped them get dressed over the phone, after which Robbie took off for Club Kong and Mako sat alone, wordless in the backyard until the temperature dipped below 50 and his nose began to drip cold snot. He then shivered his way back into the house and started tidying up the room he used to share with Robbie – his they/them glam-goth princess sibling extraordinaire – and went to bed and dreamt of drifting senselessly through an endless void, untethered to any reality, his dreamself itself dreaming of a fabricated world, of quantum theory, whales, bonsai trees, Shakespeare, snowflakes, artificial intelligence, fossilization, aurora borealis,  _ Star Trek _ , stalagmites, sexual intercourse, theology, diamonds, and love. He could break it all down into infinitely tiny pieces. It all made sense, just as he’d always wanted it to. All of it in his hands, controllable and unreal and, most importantly, his.

On March 16, 2025, Jem lets Mako sleep until eleven o’clock. Mako brushes his teeth without feeling the bristles against his gums, lost in the swirl of foamy backwash down the drain when he rinses. The street still looks a little patchy when he steps outside and squints at it, so Jem again chauffeurs him to the hospital. During the long slide down I-10, Robbie calls Mako.

“What time is it where you are?” Mako asks.

“Ten after six in the morning. What of it?”

Mako scoffs in the windshield’s direction. “Did you go to sleep last night?”

“I had a nap. Dreamt of Aubrey. Decided that wasn’t in my best interests and got up and watched a movie. Again, what of it?”

Mako, despite himself, smiles at his reflection in the right side-view mirror. For some reason he cannot quite puzzle out, he misses Robin deeply; odd, considering he hasn’t missed his sibling at all in the eight and a half years he’s spent in New Orleans. “What do you want?” he asks.

“Who says I want something?”

“Oh, so you’re calling for no reason?”

“No…” A sigh, then more of that sickly snuffling from last night’s interlude. “You’re mean to me. You’re very cold, Mako.”

Mako closes his eyes. The car rocks gently around him as Jem merges into the leftmost lane of the interstate. “What do you want?” he repeats.

“I just wanted to say sorry about last night. I shouldn’t have just unloaded on you like that, and I… I’m sorry about your mum. I hope she gets better.”

Mako has already made the feverish midnight Google searches and WebMD raids relating to metastatic breast cancer. He knows that getting better is not only unlikely, it is a borderline impossibility at this point. Still, he murmurs, “Thank you.”

“What?”

“I said  _ thank you _ , egg.” Mako opens his eyes and there is midday sun, cars exiting I-10 onto Napoleon Avenue, Jem in the driver’s seat in a clean button-down shirt. “Sometimes, you actually don’t suck that much.”

“Don’t I know it, baby boy,” Robbie retorts.

“I’m thirty-eight years old, Rob.”

“I know. Look at you.” There is a strange lilt to Robin’s words – quiet, collected, filled with Victorian affection that comes across clearly even across so many telephonic miles. It is unreal and kind of hard to stand. Mako swallows thickly.

“Listen, uh… I have to let you go. I’m on my way to the hospital to see Mum.”

“Yeah, dude, of course! Don’t let me keep you.”

“Just, uh… tell Aubrey how you feel, okay? That’s what I think. Tell him how you feel. And don’t call me at three in the morning ever again.”

There is Robbie’s Wicked Witch’s laugh, ringing through the phone at an almost deafening volume. “You got it. I love you, my magical creampuff boy.”

Mako grins. “I love you, too.” 

When Mako enters Room 520 at Oschner Baptist, Mum is sitting up in her bed, spooning drippy yellow fruit out of a plastic cup with her eyes fixed upon the overhead television. Mako makes a swift beeline for her and, before saying or doing anything else, smashes his mouth against her right temple in a firm, moist kiss that knocks her headscarf slightly askew. She looks at him strangely, with a thorough, painful sort of lucidity about her – her eyes clear and still, her brow a tad furrowed.

“What’s the matter with you, eh?” she says.

Mako looks at her and knows she will be in the ground within the year. He smiles, and today – like yesterday – he will not cry until he is already back home, tracking his miseries in the smaller hours of the morning.


	17. 17

#  _ 17 _

In the morning, they get ready. The morning routine, of course, is the most boring part any day – absolutely painful to read about, in most circumstances not worth speaking of at all. Why, of course, would you want to know about the fact that Mako finds the most profoundly comforting aspect of every day the fact that the first thing he sees just about every morning, save for those mornings when the night has turned him to face the wrong side of the room and he wakes to his flip-flops on the floor and the knockoff Matisse hanging on the wall beyond, is Jem’s shoulder blade? Why would you care about the frantic turning off of his iPhone’s 5:30 AM alarm and the sighing; the settling of his body – newly tense all over – next to Jem’s hard-slumbering form; the entirely routine, genuine, and perhaps overdramatic urge to die? Would you care to hear about the barefoot traipsing down the mahogany stairs grown chilly overnight, Stevie at his heels and a kimono wrapped around him; the adjusting of the thermostat from 69 to 73; the pouring of water from the tap into the coffeepot and the scooping of Hawaiian Blend grounds into the filter basket; the yawning as he feeds the cat, pushing his fingers affectionately through the short fur on the top of her head and idly digging the gunk out of the corners of her empty, closed eye sockets with his thumbnail?

Perhaps you would care to hear about his first cigarette of the day. It is, after all, the first line of defense against the early morning suicidality that unfailingly rears its head each and every twenty-four hour period. While the coffee brews and Stevie munches on her dry food, Mako steps outside onto the patio – still barefoot, as a bred if not born country boy – and lights up a Marlboro while watching, during Daylight Saving Time, the stars slowly blinking out of view in the light-polluted sky and the dark clouds making prophetic formations above, talking vague things like “rabbit” and “airplane” at him. He draws warm, toxic vapor into his lungs and welcomes the instant rush of prickling calm, lets the smoke dragon out of him and feels, for this moment – this very first smoke – no guilt about his resumption of his very first self-destructive habit. Jem is not there to make passive-aggressive faces at him. Mum will not get out of bed to lecture him about the nastiness of his cigarettes and Kory is not making sad eyes about his fast track to emphysema and lung cancer. He is alone in his hazy-headed loveliness, the ugliness of his addiction. He relishes it. He goes back inside.

You probably don’t care about the fact that he drinks his coffee out of the kitschy, ceramic aquarium mug that Kory got for him with money he gave to her two years ago for Christmas, with the spoon he used for stirring in too much sugar and half-and-half still in the cup, poking him in the face when he sips. You don’t care about his trip back upstairs, during which he knocks on Kory’s door to make sure she’s awake – sometimes calling through the wood, “Get up, fish, it’s morning time.” – and does not take care to be quiet when he passes back into the master bedroom, knowing Jem will sleep through whatever bullshit he gets up to until the special duck-quacking alarm meant specifically for Jem goes off at 6:30. You don’t care about the kind of pathetic ritual in the bathroom, where Mako looks at himself in the mirror and then pees and then looks at himself in the mirror again and then brushes his teeth and halfway through the brushing of the teeth gets caught looking in the mirror again and starts to dig the sandiness out of his eyes and then finishes brushing his teeth and looks at himself in the mirror yet again, planning out his beard trim and contemplating his Bioré Deep Pore Charcoal Cleanser. On this particular morning, it is at this point in the routine that Kory comes knocking on the bathroom door, saying, “Daddy? I have to pee.”

Mako opens the door and scoots out of the room. “Have at it.”

While Kory relieves herself, Mako succumbs to the temptation to get back in bed and wrap himself around Jem, who, surprising no one, stays mostly asleep. Mako is closing his eyes against the nape of Jem’s neck when the toilet’s insane flush shakes the whole upper portion of the house for the second time that morning and Kory pokes her head out of the bathroom, looking pained.

“Hey,” she says.

“Hey,” Mako replies without moving.

“There’s… there’s something wrong.”

Mako turns over and sits up, takes in Kory and the tension broadcasted distinctly on her face. He squints a little. “What do you mean, there’s something wrong?”

Kory fidgets around in the doorway – plays with the hem of her sleep shirt, with the ends of her hair, with the budding pimple on her upper lip – for a full thirty seconds before she can bring herself to answer. Being that it’s the morning, these thirty seconds feel like they last about a lifetime. “It’s like… I peed just now and it hurt? Like it really stung? And, uh… there was white stuff.”

Mako’s squint intensifies. “Do you mean discharge?”

“Yeah.” It is astoundingly clear that if Kory could disappear instantaneously, she would at this very moment. 

Mako closes his eyes and sighs. He is not embarrassed – this is his child, you see – he is just dreading having to make a doctor’s appointment and ask the inevitable, horrifying questions about Kory’s hypothetical sex life, which he has never wanted to know about and probably never will. Not out of embarrassment, mind you. He’d just generally rather not know about any sex life that isn’t his own.

He says, “I’ll call Dr. Solorzano.”

Kory whispers, “Thank you,” then waddles on out of the room. It is so cute that Mako just laughs, loudly enough that Jem actually does wake up long enough to look at him, smile softly, murmur, “So good to hear you laugh in the morning, babe,” and then go back to sleep for all of fifteen minutes.

Four days later, Mako and Kory sit side-by-side in the waiting room at the clinic on Broad Street. Kory, always happy to have a valid reason for cutting class, scrolls through her TikTok feed on her phone and surreptitiously scratches her groin through her jean shorts while Mako attempts to amuse himself with the personality quiz in a  _ Glamour _ from June 2013 – which, to be sure, is utterly impressive in its sheer longevity and still manages to be as irrelevant as it was twelve years ago, at the time of its publishing. 

**WHICH CELEBRITY POWER COUPLE IS YOUR RELATIONSHIP TWIN?**

_ What’s your favorite social media platform?   
_ A Instagram  
B Facebook  
C Twitter  
D Ugh, too much effort

_ What’s your favorite spectacle to watch with your hubby?   
_ A Fireworks  
B Netflix  
C Sporting events  
D Live theatre

_ If you could choose the way you died, which method would you go with?  
_ A Native American scalping  
B Scaphism  
C Thematically satisfying heartbreak (a la the end of  _ The Notebook _ )  
D Parachute malfunction after skydiving 

_ Are you unhappy?  
_ A Yes  
B No  
C Maybe so  
D Only when you squint

“Are those Dum Dums?” Kory asks, yanking Mako out of his reverie. She’s looking at the plastic bowl at the receptionist’s desk, filled with lollipops of all flavors. Mako rubs a hand over his mouth.

“Go take a look?” Then, when Kory gets up and starts to amble over: “And get me one. A blue raspberry.”

Kory returns with a strawberry- and a watermelon-flavored lollipop. She hands him the watermelon. “They didn’t have any blue ones.” She sits down, unwraps and sticks the strawberry pop in her mouth, scratching herself again. “I hate this.”

“Listen, Kora Mae…” Mako says this in the hushed voice demanded by the waiting room environment, speaking out of earshot of the family sitting several seats away: a white woman with a Black son and daughter. “The doctor’s going to ask you questions about your sex life.”

“Oh, man…”

“But before she does I wanted to ask you myself… are you having sex?”

Kory adopts a wide-eyed, open-mouthed expression that suggests that she’s been physically slapped. “Oh my  _ God _ , Daddy,  _ no! _ ” 

Mako goes on the defensive, raises his hand with the lollipop in it. “It’s okay if you are, you know! I mean, we’re not going to talk about how weird it is that kids are being so sexualized at such an early age that they feel this immense societal pressure to start having sex at fifteen or fourteen or even thirteen years old, because that’s probably a conversation for when you’re in college and I’ve had more time to formulate my particular take on the matter–”

“Oh my God…” Kory moans. 

“But I mean, if you’re being safe and if nobody’s getting hurt – which, I guess, wouldn’t be happening if it turned out you have an STD or something–”

“Daddy, I don’t have an STD,” Kory says with the utmost gravitas, which is promptly destroyed when she scratches her groin for the fifth time in the past ten minutes. “I’m not having sex, and you’re being so weird right now.”

“I’m sorry, okay? I know it’s not easy, me being your dad and all.” Mako shucks the wrapper off of his Dum Dum and sticks the pink ball of the confection into the pocket of his left cheek. “I just… I need to do this part, too, since your mum won’t. Can’t. Won’t.”

Kory hides behind the dark curtain of her hair. Her thumb is still going against her iPhone’s touch screen, scrolling upward. After a pregnant moment of silence and contemplation, she says, “I probably just have a yeast infection. I Googled it. Dr. S is going to give me some cream and then we can never have this conversation again.”

“I don’t want to never have this conversation again.”

Kory looks up, a little frenzied in the face. “Why?”

“Because, for all intents and purposes, I’m your mum.” Mako abruptly thinks of Alyssa, sees her twirling a perfect pirouette in tie-dye tights in his head. “I’m not saying we need to talk about this stuff all the time, but I don’t want you to feel like you don’t have anyone you can go to when it comes to this.”

Kory’s expression softens a little. She makes a slurping sound around her lollipop, then pulls it out of her mouth and asks, “Does that make Jem my dad?”

“No, no, no. We’ll have none of that heteronormative nonsense in this household. I’m still your dad. Jem will forever be your uncle.”

“My uncle that my dad kisses.”

“Oh, we do a little more than kiss, my love, but that is something we will not talk about.”

At this, Kory releases an uncontrolled giggle that bursts sideways out of a partially closed mouth and the mother across the way glances at Mako, her eyes a little narrowed. The horror averted – barely even skirted, by the way – Mako returns his attention to the inanity of his quiz and waits for the call of Kory’s name to come from the back of his office, the predicted diagnosis of candidal vulvovaginitis, the writing of a prescription for clotrimazole cream, the driving to the Walgreens by the house, where he impulse buys gummy worms, Twizzlers, and a sixteen-ounce bottle of apple juice for Kory; for himself, a fresh pack of Marlboros and Doublemint gum.

Tonight, the house feels cloying in a way that recalls Mako’s late teens, when all he wanted was to be outside and away from the cloak of domesticity that seemed to shroud everything at 50 Salamanca Road. While waiting for chicken parts to finish baking in the oven, he scrolls through the contact list on his phone and makes brief, muted faces at names that evoke vivid sense memories or, alternately, no memories at all – names like  _ roz brandabur _ (who he knows immediately is Robbie’s best friend and yet hasn’t spoken to on the phone but once, and that happened before he even had this particular phone), and  _ clay oliphant love _ (who Mako used to work and write with at a small Maori publication called  _ Tena Koe _ in Wellington, who once wanted Mako to have a threesome with him and his wife and yet whose face Mako can barely remember), and  _ cassidy villiers _ (who makes Mako’s body, every time it is touched by his memory, hot all over, can’t-stand-it warm with the aftertaste of intense lust and the beginning pangs of falling in love), and  _ margo zeltser _ (a habitual psychiatric patient who Mako once met on the streetcar and shared a passionate, unlikely friendship with before she moved to Vietnam in her particular performance of white American pseudospiritual pilgrimage). He deletes Roz and Clay. He removes the chicken from the oven. When the family decides to eat dinner in the living room, he helps Mum out of her wheelchair and into her recliner with her orthopedic pillow and her little wooden tray in her lap. He listens to the commercial-adjacent conversation that passes between Jem, Kory, and Mum without really hearing it –

“I’ve never been to Disneyworld.”

“None of us has, love. That’s an American thing.”

“We’re in America now, though. And we’re not leaving, are we? Why can’t we go?”

“Well, for one, you’re in school right now. And your dad and I are working. And your nan is uh, sick. There’s kind of a lot going on.”

“But isn’t that the perfect set of reasons to go? This moment in our lives is only going to exist right now! Seize the day, and all that!”

“What about the cost, though? Can we even afford to go to Disneyworld?”

“Oh, yeah…”

“ _ Oh, yeah _ – the  _ cost _ . There’s never been a better time to serendipitously come upon like, five-thousand dollars or some such.”

Mako chews on gravied rice and stares at the bright shapes parading about on the television: fireworks, princesses, inflated mouse heads. Fifteen minutes later, he is piling dishes into the sink when one of the tiny salad bowls on top of the stack teeters off to the floor and shatters upon impact, sending Stevie skittering out of the room and pulling yells of surprise out of everyone in the living room. 

“What the hell was that?!” Mum’s voice comes hollering over the cacophony. Mako is, of all things, shaken to the core, so he doesn’t answer – just picks the biggest porcelain shard up off of the floor and contemplates the dirtiness of the house, the impossible mess. 

He cleans the bathtubs. His back is not bad like Mum’s. With a rag cut from one of his T-shirts – which, after moving to the States, crossed the threshold between stylishly holey and dumptruck decrepit – he scrubs the Scrubbing Bubbles scum out of the textured ceramic bottom of his bathtub and Mum’s bathtub. He cleans the sinks in the same manner. He dust-mops the floors so that he can go over and wet-mop them later. With his toes stuck in another rag, he digs the stubborn grit out from the bottom corners of the living room, dining room, and kitchen, comes up with his and Mum’s and Jem’s and Kory’s wooly hair, with bits of paper, with fragments of potato chips and fluffy muffin crumbs, with unidentifiable outside dirt tracked in on the bottoms of their shoes. He gets on the floor and cleans the cabinet space below the sink. Sneezes when fine bits of dust accrue within his nostrils. Silently praises the invisible man in the room when he doesn’t find any dots of rat shit or mice shit. He cleans out the refrigerator. He discards moldy Colby-Jack and untouched celery stalks and week-old leftover pork chops and an empty grape jelly jar. He clears off every shelf and empties out every drawer to spray with Lysol and wipe down with a damp microfiber cloth. He rearranges the groceries in a more user-friendly arrangement: all beverages on the top shelf, condiments and meal items on the second shelf, veggies and deli meats in the crisper. He dusts down the television, the bookshelves, and every above-ground surface in the house. He mops every square inch of the downstairs area before depositing the mop and bucket at the bottom of the stairs so that he might later take both implements up. He scours the grime and dead insects from the windowsills with a sponge close to its deathbed. The hours pass and the sweat accumulates on his brown body and in the background he plays his old favorite and childhood obsession – Elton John. The house balloons upward in the sweet breeze of the outside, pounds upon pounds lighter in the eradication of all its dirt.

At 10:49 PM, halfway through “I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues,” Jem pops into the downstairs bathroom where Mako is standing in the shower wiping down the high window with Windex and asks him, “Are you okay?”

“What?”

“Are you okay? You haven’t said a word in four hours and you’re just cleaning the house.”

“Because it’s dirty.”

Jem’s glances briefly away from Mako, his eyes dull and unimpressed. “It’s not  _ that _ dirty.”

Without words, Mako turns around and shows Jem the wet, gritty buildup on the rag he’s been using on the window. Jem’s expression doesn’t change.

“Are you okay?” he asks again.

“No, I’m not.” Mako drops the rag onto the floor of the tub and comes half-stomping out onto the tile, to Jem, into Jem’s arms. “I’m so tired and I don’t know what to do!”

“Because the house isn’t pristine?” Jem asks into the side of his head.

“No, that’s just a convenient external manifestation of my internal disorder.” Mako  _ thunk _ s his chin down against Jem’s right shoulder. “That’s just like, the perfect thing for me to hyperfocus on so I don’t have to acknowledge that there’s nothing actually wrong with my life right now.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“What part?”

“The part about nothing actually being wrong with your life right now.”

“Oh, so there  _ is _ something wrong with my life that’s not my brain being congenitally screwed up and interpreting everything as a direct threat to like, my emotional homeostasis whateverthefuck?”

Jem pulls back to look at him, to whisper, “Your mother.” When Mako’s face crumples from the nose-center outwards, signaling imminent tears, Jem tugs their bodies back flush together, rocking Mako a little from side to side, squeezing him. “I’m sorry,” Jem says, and Mako hears it, has cynically consulted what all manner of friends, lovers, and psychologists would say about his particularly lachrymose, perhaps feminine, but entirely predictable reaction to his mother’s impending goneness, and it has altogether too much to do with his upbringing and his conviction that he has been abused as it holds hands with the fact that he loves Mum more than he is able to articulate with mere words. Even in conjunction with one another, however, these rationalizations feel inadequate. Nothing stitches together or compartmentalizes in any way that makes him able to analyze how particularly fucked he will be without her. It all just hurts. The hurting is all he is able to comprehend.

“You’re going out with the ecosystem tomorrow, right?” Jem asks.

“The c-c-crew? Crescent City Crew?” Mako tightens his face until moisture cannot escape it and allows himself to be led out of the bathroom doorway and into the kitchen, and then from the kitchen into the living room, where Mum still sits in her recliner, bookless, her having devolved somewhat into a TV-watcher in these dregs of her life. “Yeah. Godfrey and June have piping hot tea to spill.”

“Tea is a euphemism for gossip, right? I’m sorry, I’ve never been able to get with the gay lingo.”

“Tea isn’t gay lingo, it’s Black lingo. In fact, Black gay lingo. Intersectionality.”

Jem pulls Mako down onto the sofa with him in front of Friday night NBC. Mum pulls off her headscarf and begins to fold it in her lap, square to rectangle to square again. There are seven days until her seventy-seventh birthday, until the whole world unfolds into a blooming rose of fortune and happiness and life has a little meaning once more.

The following morning’s boring, inconsequential routine begins with Jem tracing figure-eights on Mako’s chest with the tip of his index finger. In the dreamland that exists between sleeping and waking, Mako dawdles without speaking or moving, staring at the ceiling and in reality not quite awake yet, just feeling real love drawn into his skin and a world happening above, around, and halfway within him that he is not all that ready to confront. 

“You used to have these pictures,” Jem is saying and he is only partially hearing. “You were a kid in them, playing with goats and sheep. I wonder if you still have them. I used to look at them when I would come to your house back in Wellington and think about what kind of person you used to be and like, hold the two of you up to each other, comparing both of you. Now there would be three of you, I guess, or even four of you. You’ve changed since I met you. Not in a bad way – you’re just different than the way you were before.”

“I’m different?” Mako asks.

“Hey, there. Good morning.” Jem’s mouth is on his face, the lips journeying over his left cheek and over to the corner of his mouth. “I was just talking to you. I didn’t even think you were listening – you had this weird, zoned-out look on your face.”

“Mmnh.” Mako moves to kiss back and manages to get Jem’s jaw. “Do you ever think about the fact that you’re the first and the last thing I see every day, and vice versa?”

“Yeah.” Jem smiles, a sleepy, Mona Lisa slip of a thing. “That thought is usually followed up by complete disbelief that something I’d literally wanted for years after I met you is going to be my reality for the rest of my life, barring any instances of infidelity or divorce.” He laughs a little. “I’m so happy I get to kiss your neck until the day I die.”

“Shut up,” Mako says, then throws arms around Jem’s neck and wrestles him into the bed, squeezing around his windpipe with playful yet no less vicious savagery. Amidst Jem’s noises of genuine, happy asphyxiation, Mako rolls on top of the other and murmurs, “Sometimes I love you so much I actually hate it.”

“That’s fair,” Jem croaks. Mako briefly tightens his chokehold, then lets go. He’d actually like to kill Jem one day, to eat Jem’s uncooked heart right out of the chest cavity, but he files this thought away in the folder of weirdnesses he keeps in the deepest, darkest corner of his mind and pretends it doesn’t exist for the sake of their relationship’s continued health. 

When Mako parks his car in Uptown about two hours later and walks to the corner of St. Charles and Napoleon wearing aviator sunglasses, wearing a deeply stupid button-down with pineapples all over it, wearing his sexy jeans and his Doc Martens in a manner intended to melt onlookers directly into the pavement, a woman with pink hair and meaty arms whistles at him and goes, “Oh,  _ yes _ , mama!” KC, Godfrey, and June are already standing in front of Superior Seafood when he gets there; KC, with her ample breasts hanging halfway out of her low-cut dress, runs directly to him as soon as she sees him and kisses him directly on the mouth, cooing, “Mako, my love, my life, my everything!”

“KC, my angel, my darling, my hero!”

KC looks at him with her hands on his chest the way most people dream in their adolescence to be looked at – strange, really, and almost scandalous in her tenderness toward him. “You look good, baby,” she says, and kisses him again on the furry curve of his jaw. “You got all dolled up just for me?”

Mako grins, pressing his mouth into the glazed doughnut broad of her forehead. “Of course I did.”

She was born Kaylynn Claire and raised in New Orleans – Uptown her hood, Broadway her street. Bisexual and unabashedly Black from the jump, she spent her earlier years – and, even now, has the same treatment inflicted on her against her will – being put into boxes that didn’t quite suit her by her mother, the real estate agent with aching and smelly feet; a school system intolerant toward big mouths and fat hearts; boys and men who sent her dick pics without her consent or her particular interest; and the police, who stalked her neighborhood without abandon and who she now, as an adopted Mid-City bitch with a six year old child, avoids like the plague, reading lists of her rights off of her smartphone whenever they appear within a sixty-foot radius. Her life changed in mostly minor ways that, all together, accumulated into one major way when she met Godfrey – a Taiwanese-American boy from the Lower Garden District who came from plastic surgeons and law professors and ran alongside the Mississippi River with a Black boy who called himself Daiquiri, who modeled clothes in Teen Vogue once upon a time and ate edibles through his Loyola undergraduate existence, who practiced corporate law for the money and loved women as one loved water or sweet wine, who loved KC in a way that superseded all of his shitty male habits and her many years of accrued self-defenses – and by some stroke of mixed fortune, ended up marrying him a year before meeting Mako, her soul’s true match and the one she’d gladly have spent her life with if she’d only met him earlier. Mako is aware of all of these things when KC takes his hand in hers and leads him over to where Godfrey and June stand in front of the restaurant, smoking the same cigarette because, Mako presumes, June has run out or Godfrey is trying (and failing) for the nth time to quit.

“Hey, guess what?” Mako says. “I stole your wife.”

“You can have her,” Godfrey replies without missing a beat. “I’m getting tired of that old bitch anyway.”

“I’m so glad you’re here,” June says to Mako, scratching idly at her sternum through her pinstriped blouse and passing the cigarette off to Godfrey. “I’ve been putting up with this for five minutes now and I was starting to lose my patience.”

“I think I was born to be a buffer,” Mako muses. “Third wheels unite.”

“We’re waiting for the lesbians,” KC says, then starts to jump up and down. “But I’m  _ hungry _ , y’all. Shouldn’t we just go and get a table already? You know they always take a long time.”

As if on cue, Gloria and Cynthia round the corner from St. Charles and sort of immediately run right into Godfrey and June. Gloria blinks, shakes her head a little. “Hello!”

“Good! Alright! That’s what I’m fucking talking about!” KC bolts directly for the door and drags Mako along with her without saying another word. Godfrey gives Gloria a dull look of resignation. 

“I love getting together,” he says, and they all file into the restaurant.

The friend group is coming off of a many-tentacled crisis that has been snowballing since the beginning of last month and only recently resolved itself through the efforts undertaken by pretty much everyone, to some extent, save Cynthia, who has never cared to involve herself in anything about anything. It started when Godfrey called KC out on the air in particularly harsh fashion over her mistaken assumption that Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin were in a relationship in the ‘60s the same day that Gloria had her LASIK procedure done, after which KC walked out of the show an hour before its close and Gloria woke up partially blind in her left eye. It took a week for Godfrey to reach out to Mako and Cynthia under the guise of simply inviting them to take a three-week jujitsu course with him – a week during which Mako and Gloria became slightly unwilling participants in a group chat with KC in which KC absolutely slammed her husband out of a sense of pure terror regarding the state of their relationship’s emotional integrity, and, on the other side of things, Godfrey and June had a whopping three Super Smash Bros dates at June’s apartment on Freret Street. At jujitsu, Mako accidentally crushed his knee into Godfrey’s face and, out of pure instinct, Godfrey punched him directly in the throat in retaliation, winding him for all of three minutes. Cynthia was given the phone number of the instructor – a butch woman with a Brazilian accent and a long ponytail that hung down to her butt – and promptly threw the slip of paper on which it was written in the trash can outside of the gym. Afterwards at Pyramids Café, while they shared a plate of hummus and grape leaves and waited for shawarma, Godfrey pulled out his phone and showed Mako and Cynthia screenshots of the super-secret group chat sent to him by June who in turn had the screenshots sent to her by Gloria.

“Oh, my God,” Mako groaned, putting his sweat-damp face in his hands and aching for deliciously thin cuts of lamb.

“Look, look – I’m not mad at you,” Godfrey said, putting his phone down in the middle of the table. Cynthia munched boredly on pita bread. “I know my wife, okay? I know she’s like, an emotional vortex that everyone kind of gets sucked into and they don’t really have a choice–”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Mako cut in.

“What would you say?”

“I’d say she’s like, upset when she’s upset and she needs support when she’s upset.” Unwittingly, Mako allowed his voice to lower into some half-terrified, affectionate decibel. “And I mean, I love her, so I’m not just going to–”

“I know, I know.” Godfrey sighed. “I’m just– why would she not talk to me, is the thing? Why would she run to you and Glo instead of just having a conversation with me?”

“Hell if I know, Godfrey,” Mako blurted, then said, more seriously, “She feels like you don’t care about her feelings. Did you read the texts? Actually read them?”

“I don’t know, I was too busy being pissed off.”

“Okay, then stop. Being pissed off, I mean. You’re both in the middle of this and you’re not seeing each other and one of you needs to like, open your eyes or whatever and be the bigger person. I don’t think KC’s going to do it.”

Godfrey looked profoundly sad, then, profoundly sad and profoundly lonely in a way that both aroused in Mako the most intense sympathy and made him want to slap the man. He reached for a semicircle of pita and began to rip rough-edged shards of bread off of it. “Do you know what it’s like to go to bed with someone you’re angry with? To live in the same house with someone you miss but also, like, no shit want to punch out? Not in a domestic violence way. Just because they make you so mad.”

Mako looked at Cynthia, who was sipping at her Lebanese tea and looking at something on her phone. He gave Godfrey a sheepish grin. “I’m on the autism spectrum and I’m living with my partner, my mum, and a fifteen year old.  _ Yes _ , dude.”

Godfrey knocked his fist against his forehead. “Duh.”

“Did I ever tell you about the time Jem went to Wellington for two weeks and when he came back I was so, so goddamn mad at him for what basically amounted to no fucking reason? I felt like he was going to abandon me, and all I needed to do was talk to him, but  _ no _ . For two more weeks after he got home, I was hell on wheels. I wanted to punch him out in his sleep. Every time he made noise I thought I was going to scream.”

“Did the sound of him eating make you see red?”

“Talk about it. And then he’d want to kiss me and I’d just –  _ aaah! _ ”

“ _ Aaah! _ ”

“ _ Aaah! _ ” 

Cynthia cleared her throat, but said nothing.

“We talked about it, though,” Mako said. “We’re big on that – talking. And now I’m happy to say that I will never be irrationally, hypocritically paranoid about Jem leaving me for some overseas teaching job ever again. I have a whole world of other things to get mad about for no reason, and when I do inevitably get mad about them, we’ll talk again, and again, and again until…” He made a vague, expansive gesture with his arms. “Until we’re dead.”

Godfrey frowned. “That’s depressing.”

“Only if you don’t like talking,” Mako said. Godfrey swabbed hummus off of their shared plate and put it in his mouth, staring at his phone, contemplating this.

The next day at 7:46 PM, KC called Mako in a frenzy and told him to meet her at the lakefront, hanging up before he could protest on the grounds that he was only halfway through cooking dinner. When, forty minutes later, he arrived and went walking down the lakefront looking for his favorite head of kinky brown curls, he was only very surprised to run into KC with her hair dyed ash blonde, permed bone-straight, and cut pixie short.

“Who the hell are you?!” he cried as he approached the stone bench on which she sat, his arms cast outward and his eyes as big as baby worlds. “What did you do with your head?”

KC smiled. She looked as though she’d been crying. “I have poor impulse control when I’m upset.  _ Fuck _ , this is going to be so high-maintenance for the next three months at least.”

Mako’s hands found her shoulders. “How much did that cost you? Must’ve been over two-hundred.”

KC put her hands on top of his and looked up at him with red, damp eyes. “I don’t even care, dude, I could kill myself right now.”

“I would say you’re being overdramatic, but I don’t know the extent of the problem.” Mako sat down next to KC and kept holding her left hand. “What happened?”

Somewhere in KC’s rambling, overly moist reply, it became apparent that Godfrey had interpreted Mako’s advice to talk things out as the go ahead to angrily accuse KC of emotional dishonesty and oversensitivity, and that KC’s corresponding reaction had involved a verbal breakdown of the high-velocity, highly Scorpian sort and resulted in the partial breakage of her phone, the likely traumatizing of her son, and a trip to Head Quarters Hair Salon on Bourbon Street. By her third cigarette, KC stopped crying so hard and succumbed to simply watching the gently-sloshing waters of Lake Pontchartrain, which appeared silver and perfect in the advancing darkness of the night. She tapped ash onto the gray pavement and murmured, “God, I wish I could have met you first.”

“Don’t ever say anything like that to me ever again,” Mako said, very seriously and very lovingly. “Even if it is true. You’re married.”

“I know.”

“I’m getting married.”

“I know.”

“I don’t want to be that guy, but you’re both acting like kids.”

KC looked at him with a wry, sad sort of grin on her face. “He just doesn’t understand, Mako. I mean, we’ve always taken potshots at each other, but there is such a thing as going too far. I have feelings. They’re valid feelings.”

“Of course they are. Is it possible for you – both of you – to talk about your feelings without either yelling at each other about them or making them into a joke?”

KC sniffed wetly and shrugged. “Sometimes.”

This boded well for the rest of the month.

Over the course of the next week, things started to even out. As the two resident males in the friend group, Mako and Godfrey were enlisted by Gloria and Cynthia to help them move their new credenza – dubbed “the mankiller” on account of its enormous, kind of nonsensical weight – into their bedroom. The men were paid for their efforts in salmon sandwiches and craft beer and amused themselves with Gloria and Cynthia’s small, somewhat artsy collection of lesbian porn – all of which was “obviously made for men,” according to an eye-rolling, hard-sighing Gloria. Godfrey posted pictures from seven Mardi Grases ago on Facebook at 11:37 PM on a Tuesday – photos primarily of Mako and KC smoking in Uptown and drinking beer out of translucent plastic Solo cups, wearing strings of beads and Hawaiian shirts, arms draped around each other’s bodies – and declared, in the caption, that, “All you guys ever do is smoke.” Mako liked the pictures. Showed Jem the evidence of his New Orleans life before Jem had moved into it. At the second jujitsu class, Mako and Cynthia grappled with each other on a foam mat on the floor and did not, by the way, accidentally hit each other even once. Lunch was purchased at Sarita’s on Freret. The following exchange occurred over text:

#    
  


**Wednesday** 10:23 PM

**kc ramsey  
** what do you want to be when you grow up?

**mako gehringer  
** happy

**kc ramsey  
** oh get out of here with that cute shit

#    
  


Mako went to bed feeling good about himself for once. A bookstore opened in the Bywater and hosted a poetry reading at which June was featured. She blew the house down, as was and is her singular and particular talent. Afterward, Mako and June sat outside with pony-necked beers – canoodling a little, holding hands and staring into each other’s eyes – and talked about queer identity politics for thirty minutes; about their sex lives; about June’s overwhelming, globalized unhappiness back when she was Godfrey’s classmate at Loyola and everyone knew her as Joe and nobody – nobody – wanted to sleep with her. Godfrey and KC came half-drunkenly out into the citified darkness and showed them one of Godfrey’s baby pictures – recently filched from his parents’ house during an awkward family dinner – and Mako became so absolutely obsessed with baby Godfrey’s precious fatness of face, his smallness of eye, his fuzziness of hair, that he immediately snapped a picture of the photograph with his phone and made the image his Facebook profile picture for the next week. Three nights later, Mako FaceTimed with his favorite couple, all parties half-naked in bed and mostly unready for the work week to come. 

“So I’m guessing you guys made up?” he asked with a yawn, halfway listening to Jem move around in the bathroom, getting ready for bed.

“That remains to be seen,” Godfrey said, then yawned himself, whispering, “Dammit, Mako.”

“We mostly just got tired of being mad at each other,” KC put in. Mako laughed.

“That works.”

KC looked at Godfrey, all smooth brown skin half-pixelated on the screen of Mako’s phone, her strange and somewhat cynical affection for her husband clear on her face and in her voice when she said, “Sometimes I don’t know why I married you.”

Godfrey’s eyebrows flew upward and became one with his hairline. “Uh, because you love me?”

“Oh, yeah.” There came KC’s high, gut-busting laugh, metallic over the phone and yet no less beautiful, no less contagious. Less than a week later, she is laughing that same laugh as Mako is asking the group, “Why do we always eat in Uptown?” while they all sit down at their table for six at Superior.

“Where else is there to eat in New Orleans?” June retorts.

“We should go to Commander’s Palace one day,” Godfrey says. All at once, Mako, Gloria, and June produce harsh, incredulous laughter.

“I hope you’re paying!” Gloria cries.

“One time I was seventeen and my family was at Commander’s Palace,” Godfrey continues without acknowledging the contemptuous reaction to what he’s said, uttering this like a true former rich boy, an excommunicated member of Crescent City income royalty. “I saw Brad Pitt and I almost pissed myself. Stupid, really, considering I’m much prettier than the Pitt by far.”

“Godfrey’s best quality is his ego, I think,” June remarks as a couple of waiters come around to put complimentary bread rolls, Little Dippers of butter, and some ice water on the table. 

“No, it’s his personality while he’s high,” Mako argues right after passing a quick word of thanks to the waiter currently pouring his tall glass of water. “Never have I felt so loved as I did on that Mardi Gras when we had a sleepover and Godfrey cuddled me while I was crossfaded and trying to go to sleep on a floor with  _ no blankets _ .”

“Do you guys ever step back and realize that all of our memories of each other come from Mardi Gras from years past?” Gloria asks and slices a bread roll in half, handing one segment of the roll to Cynthia and slathering butter on the other with a knife. 

“Okay!” Godfrey starts clapping his hands with a loud, male stridency – them always so noisy in any public place, drawing the eyes and the ire of everyone in a ten-foot radius. “I don’t mean to be a dick but can I tell my story? I feel like I’m going to burst holding it in any longer.”

Mako and KC, sitting side-by-side, looked at each other before looking at Gloria and June. Cynthia munched on fresh bread and intoned, “We wouldn’t want that, now would we?”

So began today’s Tale of Daiquiri, the last in a series of seventy-three. Daiquiri – only sparingly known by his given name, Mack Burgess – is an Jamaican-American magical wild child and Godfrey’s prototypical bestie, the keeper of the keys to his lovely beating, bleeding heart before Mako came to town and stole them all away. Born under the strangest of signs (Ophiuchus, according to the sidereal zodiac; Sagittarius by any other normal ass person’s estimation) in a violet-blue sand dome in the sky, passed from New Orleans private school to New Orleans private school until he landed, finally, in the lap of Godfrey, Daiquiri’s talents include walking down Bourbon street in Scarlett O’Hara dresses (not that he’s ever had the displeasure of watching  _ Gone With the Wind _ ; he skipped that week in the spring of eighth grade and was simply told about the film’s unpleasant racial overtones by Godfrey over the phone, after which he declared “pooh-pooh” on it all); pedicabbing through the Quarter and garnering tips through the power of his peculiar dreadlocked, gap-toothed, silver-tongued charm; falling in love in particularly Makoian fashion with just about everyone he set his sparkling, pinwheeling, perpetually roaming eyes; and playing various chordophones on street corners for change to supplement his informal and somewhat irregular sources of income. In past Tales of Daiquiri, our main man has danced Michael Jackson for the amusement of nursing home patients; journeyed to secret New Orleans bars erected behind dumpsters and abandoned houses; befriended a skirt-clad John Malkovich in the lines of French Quarter grocery stores; and fallen headfirst into the Mississippi with Godfrey, trying to catch rainbow fish of the children’s storybook kind. Today’s Tale sees him running off to Jamaica to marry a woman he met while driving for Uber and has known for all of a month and a half, and it carries in it a finality none of the other Tales have yet possessed.

“I feel like I’m never going to see him again,” Godfrey says, looking, almost scarily, like he wants to cry.

“Oh, bullshit,” June interjects with her rarely expressed though always felt brand of general scorn. “He’s going to come back and fall in love with a streetcar technician or his bank teller–”

“Bold of you to assume he goes to banks,” KC mutters. Mako stifles his laughter in his water.

“And then he and Uber-chick will get an annulment and he’ll be right back to crashing on your couch when he’s homeless and dancing it up at the senior citizens’ home.” June puts a bit of butter onto the pad of her index finger and then sucks it off, thus tainting the butter for everyone – not that anyone really cares. “You’ll see him again.”

“This is marriage, though,” Godfrey says. “Marriage!”

“So?”

“ _ So _ , it’s such a big step. It like, changes you.”

June gives Godfrey a skeptical look. “Did you getting married change  _ you? _ ”

Godfrey turns to KC – almost squinting at her, scrutinizing the woman as if she is a stone full of hairline cracks and sedimentary layers to which he, a geologist, would like to devote his singular, loving attention – then returns his attention to June and says, “Well, yeah. Do you remember how much of a dick I was before I got married?”

“I’d love to meet that version of Godfrey,” Mako comments. Cynthia, saying nothing, nods her assent and drinks her ice water.

“I existed completely for myself. Not saying that’s a bad thing, but it’s just completely unsustainable after you get married or have a child. After those two things, your life becomes all about the people you love and you can’t help it, you like… go soft and alone and get really low to the ground, and you only have room for the people you really,  _ really _ care about, you know?”

June raises an eyebrow in question. “Are you saying that Daiquiri doesn’t really,  _ really _ care about you?”

Godfrey shrugs. “I don’t know.” He smiles – a gentle, kind of sad thing pulling itself like a sled across his face. “I know him better than anyone and yet I know nothing about him. Is that weird, or what?”

The table grows quiet and stays that way for all of ten seconds. June proceeds with her thematically appropriate story about her sister’s impending marriage and her family’s utterly offensive desire for her to get a haircut and wear a suit to the wedding – “Which, by the way, I could totally pull off but that’s not the fucking point.” Mako eats oysters raw and, with a pristine view of St. Charles Avenue as it slides and slips greenly by outside, eats off of KC and Godfrey’s plates, tasting grilled Atlantic salmon served over a creamy bed of mushroom and spinach orzo and barbecue shrimp with peppery butter sauce. When he gets home, he goes upstairs and finds Kory well on her way to taking a nap.

“Hey,” she says from somewhere inside the nest of her own making, her head popped up off of her pillow as he approaches her bed.

“Hey, fish,” he replies. He dips down to kiss her forehead, then her mouth, then says, “Just wanted to tell you that I love you.”

Kory smiles a little, settling down into her cocoon of comforters and pillows. “I love you, too.”

Heading for the door: “How’s the vag?”

Kory emits a low, groaning sound of pure mortification. “Not talking about it.”

“Alright then.” Mako leaves the room and goes to find Jem playing the guitar in their bedroom and scribbling notes out on a blank template for sheet music. He crawls into bed behind Jem’s back and closes his eyes. He is astoundingly happy to be home.

The morning of Mum’s seventy-seventh, Jem reaches out for him, still sleeping, and pulls him into his body. It is Friday. The sun has not yet climbed over the rooftops to show its yellow face to the Bywater, to New Orleans, to this sinking and disintegrating sliver of Earth. In five minutes, Mako’s alarm will go off and this particular brand of intimacy will cease to exist for the rest of the day – will be swallowed up in the necessity of working and talking to others and frying fish in the kitchen tonight, watching Mum eat it while she complains of hurting all over, everywhere, her body a whole, globalized sore – but for now, among the folds of dark blankets and sheets that they neglect to neaten during the day, Jem holds Mako and Mako is held, his hands folded over where Jem’s press into the center of his chest.

After getting up and doing the thermostat-changing, coffee-making, cat-feeding, patio-smoking thing, Mako slips into Mum’s room with her birthday moleskin and, leaving the notebook on her nightstand, kisses her bald head and murmurs, “Happy birthday.” To his silent terror, she wakes up mid-kiss, looks at him, and after letting this looking go on for long, kind of horrifying moments, says, “Thought you’d slip one past me, huh?”

“No, to be honest.” Mako’s face is soft and filled with knowing. “You’re too sharp, and I’m not that quick.”

“You are, my love.” Mum’s arm emerges from beneath the covers, her hand brushing up Mako’s arm beneath the satiny sleeve of his kimono, fingers tracing over seahorses and koi fish. In her early morning sleepiness, she smiles at him as if he is her world entire. “When you want to be.”

Mako is abruptly taken by the urge to curl himself up against her stomach – to float and bob there like a buoy – and approximate his fetal size, weight, and bodily position. Instead, he kisses her head again and leaves the room to drink his first cup of coffee, wake Kory up, and pass the blessed minutes of this morning through his fingers like water, remarkably similar to a sea god in his love for the aquatic. 

Twenty-six years ago, on an afternoon lit by an orange sun and smelling thickly of brine, Mum took him with her on a boat drifting along the western coast of the North Island. The morning before this, he sat in her office on the square quilt he’d played on as a baby, reading  _ Moonraker _ while she completed paperwork and ran all over the workplace talking to people, coordinating their trip, occasionally yelling – the typical Rui Ngata shuffle. These boring, uneventful hours in the beginning of the day – the hours of putting himself together like a puzzle, of waiting in the wings and waiting in the car while they drove to Kahwia and even waiting in the boat while they searched all around for the elusive and endangered Maui’s dolphin – they were worth it, instrumental to the whole experience even, when joy came with the appearance of a crescent moon cetacean leaping out of the water into the cool, salty air, and all of the deeply put-together, deeply adult marine biologists in the boat – Mako’s mother among them – yelled out, “ _ Ay! _ ” at once and began to applaud.

“Did you see him, Mako?” Mum asked, her hands going to his head, to the fin-like spread of his shoulder blades beneath his bright red T-shirt. “Did you see the dolphin?”

“I did,” Mako replied, and the dolphin soared into the air once more, this time with a twin companion, stealing his breath and his heart and all of the morning’s boredoms away. He watched his mother pull on a wetsuit and jump into the water – in her spine the same perfect moony arc as the one exhibited by Maui’s dolphin – and just then he knew what it was, maybe for the first time, to understand her on her own terms, the terms of swimming with rare fish and driving for hours upon hours and signing papers with ballpoint pens running fast out of ink and touching him, sometimes, when she felt so inclined. 

It’s been a long time since Kahwia. Mako hasn’t seen his mother have so much fun in all of the intervening years. There’s a part of him that knows, almost genetically, that she didn’t want him – never asked for his existence, just sort of stumbled into him in the same way he stumbled into her – but he’d like to have a morning that melts into an afternoon where she will smile at him or some appropriate body of water the way she did on the day of Maui’s dolphin and early-hours honey stagnation. He’d like it to happen before she goes away.


	18. 18

#  _ 18 _

Spring Break comes at exactly the right time. On the night of the last day of classes before the hiatus, Jem drags himself into bed, looking like the temperature of the sun with his burgeoning stubble and his boxers that hug him in all of the right ways, and looks Mako directly in his tired, classically Maori face and asks him, “Wanna fuck?”

Mako smiles and closes his eyes. “I might fall asleep.” He listens to Jem’s sigh.

“Me too.”

Mako reaches out and finds Jem’s hand, squeezes it. “Tomorrow?”

Jem laughs – lovely, thunderous rumbling. “It’s a date.”

They go to sleep.

Tonight, Mako dreams of marrying Jem in the New Zealand summer on Lyall Bay. He dreams of flying to warm and windy Wellington two days before the wedding through LAX in Los Angeles, Kingsford Smith International in Sydney (where Jem eats a tuna fish wrap at Subway and vomits in the men’s bathroom amidst Mako’s soothing backrubs), and finally Wellington International in Wellington, where they are picked up in an eight-seater sedan by a Tatum wearing plastic Polynesian flowers in her exceptionally short, exceptionally trendy hair. She has just broken up with Stephani, as she is quick to inform them – clinging to Mako’s body, screaming into his left ear, “Hi! You’re here, you’re here, you’re here! Guess what?! Stephani’s uninvited to the wedding! That bitch is gone! Out of my life! How are you?! I’m so happy to see you!”

Mako, feeling that soft and tingly lovefeeling that is endemic to every social interaction with Tatum, holds her tightly to him and screams back, “You are my responsibility now! I love you and you will be happy on the day that I get married!”

Jem exchanges glances with Mum, who has invested in a wig for the wedding and looks as an overweight skeleton draped in sagging skin and fat would, her tumors popping out on her chest, her arms, and her perfect brown cranium. Kory is next in line to get a hug from Tatum; she rocks back and forth with the woman and says, with a clarity that echoes strangely in Mako’s sleeping brain, “I missed you, Mum.”

Tatum kisses Kory on her round, moony face and pulls long fingers through her long tresses. “I missed you too, my Kory.”

They stay at Tatum and Stephani’s house in Kowhai Park. Stephani, nowhere to be seen, has left her clothes all over the place – even on the roof – and they are all enlisted to help Tatum pick up each garment and throw them out onto the front yard underneath a big yellow sign reading “POST-LESBIAN BREAKUP GARAGE SALE.” Afterwards, they eat unclean scallops for dinner and Mum entertains the collective with an Arian speech she has pulled directly out of her ass and yet, somehow, at the same time, has sat on for years, waiting for the right moment to deliver:

“I never thought Mako would get married. I always expected him to stay alone like me. That’s why I raised him the way I did. You bring up your kids in your own special experiences, and my experience was one of scholarship and loneliness. I don’t know why, Mako, but you were never much of a scholar despite having all the makings for it. Lord knows you can write. Lord knows you have the brain for it, as hard-headed and stubborn and just, so, breathtakingly smart as you are. But – and this is just my rotten luck – you had to go and decide to become an  _ artist _ . An  _ alternative _ – and not a very alternative alternative at that. You had to run off with some crazed, immature, very obviously flawed woman who did not possess in her heart even a fraction of the love you possessed in yours for her, have a child out of wedlock, and then leave that very same crazed, immature, very obviously flawed woman only to end up with what? Another artist devoid of prospects! One day you wake me up and tell me you’re getting married. I’m supposed to be happy about this. The way I see it, your life is just one slow slide into financial instability and perpetual unhappiness, and I’m just glad to be out and away from it – into the breathtaking ether and gone, forever – as soon as is humanly possible. If only my body would hurry up and give out.” She drinks her wine and raises her glass to the room. “Chur.”

“Chur,” the room replies in unison. Mako looks at his mother and perceives directly the swirling vortex of anger within her, just beneath her skin, powerful as a Category 5 hurricane, enough to kill him dead and keep her living for the next five years. 

"You’ve never been on my side," he declares. Mum scoffs.

"I’ve always been on your side!"

"No, you haven’t!” he cries, and the scallops begin to quiver with fear, Kory hiding her face behind her hair until she appears to be a Cousin Itt, nothing but tresses. “You’ve wanted me to be perfect–"

"And that's wrong?"

"I could never be perfect! I’m just as fucked up as you!"

Mum stabs her fork in the air in his direction, growling, "Because you’ve never tried–"

"No, Mum, you're going to listen to me for once!” Here it comes: what he’s always needed and has never been availed of the opportunity to say – real life simply too boring for it all, nothing like the vibrant, repetitive video loop shadow realm of dreams. “You are so, so unbelievably fucking mean and, and, and angry! And I am ruined because of it, forever! I will never love myself the way I could if you only loved me the way I was: flawed, ugly, lazy, and so fragile it's disgusting! I know I'm supposed to be this monolith of like, masculine perfection who takes criticism without question and is impervious to bullshit, but you know what? I'm not! I'm sorry! I'm sorry I was never the boy you wanted me to be! I'm sorry you ever had to deal with me! You've made it so hard to be alive that all I want, for both of our sakes, is to be dead in the ground right next to you! Maybe then we'll both be happy."

Mako finishes by sobbing into his hands and goes to bed on Tatum’s living room floor under the blanket they used to sleep under at Blaise’s house back in 2004. Jem pets his hair all through the night, returning the favor of Subway-induced backrubs. 

They dress in dashikis and old sneakers for the wedding. This is odd because Mako would never, ever, ever wear a dashiki for reasons of basic respect and propriety. Tatum reaches into her seemingly endless inventory of plastic Polynesian flowers and finds fake white leis with which to surround Mako and Jem’s necks, and she is the one walking Mako down the aisle rather than his mother or his father, Mum having resigned herself to angrily sitting all the way near the back of the congregated guests, fussing over her wig and scratching her tumors; and Ezra much too taken with the young, twinkish male companion he has brought as his plus-one – the instance of this both impossible and utterly delightful.

Their officiant looks like Stephani but is not Stephani. Heavyset, long-haired, and Maori, she turns to Jem and says, “And now for the reading of the vows.”

This is a moment that seems to last forever. Him staring into Jem staring into him. Endless burst of hazel, dark penumbras surrounding the iris and the pupil. Aroha has crashed the wedding in a strapless, backless dress and will get knockout drunk and run away with the officiant, flicking her tongue between her index and middle fingers on her merry way out. The surf rock/Talking Heads cover band fittingly named Surfing Heads will play all of Mako’s favorite hits as he waltzes along the beach with Tatum and Kory and Jem but mostly Tatum in his arms, and when Tatum cries out, “God, I’m so lonely!” in her overriding loneliness, he will kiss her on the mouth and promise to be her next great love after Jem dies and they are both seventy-three years old. Kory will fall in love with Loren and Blaise’s three year old girlspawn, and so that she can fulfill her dreams of being an adoptive big sister, Mako and Jem will relocate the family to New Zealand, start The Feed Dogs with Tatum and Quick, and eventually win the Academy Award for Best Original Score when they write the soundtrack to a New Zealand family epic/adventure flick. None of it compares in intensity and stupidity and sheer, perfect breadth to Jem holding Mako’s hands in front of all of the people they love and singing, to the tune of “If You Leave Me Now”, “ _ If you love me, babe, I’ll never leave you even for one day. You will see, my dear, we’ll make it through. _ ”

Too much.

So much, in fact, Mako could die of glee and embarrassment.

He wakes up for a moment right then, breathing hard into the night air and searching for Jem. 

Before he can find him, he falls back asleep and dreams of the honeymoon.

It is a funeral. Mum kicks it after a day of speaking no nice words and tossing the wedding cake into the sea like ashes of the dead. When they send Mum’s body off after the cake in a dinghy, wrapped in an old sheet and equipped with a fork with which to eat the spongy, kind of boring white angel food, Jem takes Mako’s hand and tells him of being told by the late and great Rui Ngata of her proudness of Mako, her overwhelming love for him, when she found Jem in the bathroom on the plane between Sydney and Wellington and spilled her cancerous guts into Jem’s waiting, unclean hands.

“She told me she adored you,” Jem says, his thumb pushing affectionately into the center of Mako’s palm. “She loved you, she did.”

Mako doesn’t know if it matters anymore.

He goes back to a time when it did. He remembers when he left 50 Salamanca Road for university. He remembers packing his wardrobe full of T-shirts and paisley-patterned button-downs handed down from Ezra’s thoroughly unwild ‘70s existence, and his eclectic collection of books (the stolen Janet Evanovich, Ian Fleming, Yusef Komunyakaa, the quintessential Janet Frame, many-authored encyclopedias, anthologies of modern art and sculpture, nineteen-page zines, some Jerry Spinellis from his middle childhood), and the reticulated digeridoo Nana Victoria had given to him for his fourteenth birthday, and his guitar with the permanent marker doodlings of fish and naked women on the body, and a single photograph of Nana Victoria holding him as a smiley and unbearably weird eight year old, and a quilt covered with white swirls of  _ koru _ , and a bright red parka for the wintertime, and curtains Mum had bought for him despite his insistence that he didn’t need them, and new underpants with penguins and alligators on them, and his 311 and Black Eyed Peas and Blue October albums on compact disc, and his inherited PowerBook G4 that made him unique among his friends in his ownership of a personal computer, and a simple set of pots and pans and basic utensils to get him through the nights devoid of fast food, and an Ikea lamp with a white paper shade. Sitting in the forest of cardboard boxes that his room had become in the wake of all the packing, Mako crossed his legs in the center of his bed and watched his mother survey the exhibition from the doorway, her arms folded, her expression somewhat impassive.

“I’m proud of you,” she said for maybe the first time in his life ever. It was a preemptive sort of pride – anticipatory of greatness he had not yet achieved – and this became astoundingly clear when she went on to say, “Kick ass in there, Mako. Don’t let anyone catch you off guard and stupid, you hear? You’re smart. You’re strong. Keep your head up and you’ll be the best thing to come out of Victoria U.”

Mako was double-majoring in English writing and art history of all things and already had two weed hookups lined up for the coming semesters. He highly fucking doubted he would be the cream of the university’s crop, but if his mother somehow found it in her heart to believe in him, he would not question her judgment. He only hoped he would prove her convictions right.

He lived in a blandly-carpeted, sparsely-furnished suite with Jem, Quick, and a doughy-faced Pakeha from Christchurch named Stuart Rosenthal, who the Wellington Teasippers in nearly no time at all took to calling simply “Stu.” The second to turn up at the new digs, fifteen minutes after check-in began and thirteen minutes after Jem himself had arrived, Mako wasted no time a) launching himself into Jem’s arms, into a backslapping, deeply masculine hug with which to kick off their newfound cohabitation; and b) claiming the bed by the window in the double room he would share with Jem, because he was selfish and assertive and cared not for the bunk pushed into the dark nook on the opposite side of the room. Their residence assistant – a junior biochem major called Sawyer – popped his sandy-colored head into the apartment after Mako and Jem’s haphazard unpacking of clothes and books and musical instruments got truly underway; juggling, for some reason, three moderately-sized lemons in his hands, he called into the novel, somewhat mildewy emptiness, “Eh, is anyone here yet?!”

“We are!” Mako half-skipped into the living room carrying his handful of Jerry Spinellis. He took in Sawyer’s lanky tallness, his possession of citrus. “What’s with the lemons, bro?”

“Lemonade,” was all Sawyer said. “What’s your name?”

“Mako Gehringer.” When Jem’s head appeared in the bedroom doorway, bespectacled and dorky: “That’s Jeremiah. We were born Siamese twins – attached at the hip.”

“So that explains the resemblance.” Sawyer grinned, then began to retreat from the apartment’s open door, nodding like a bobblehead. “Let me know if you guys need anything, yeah? I’ll come check on you once you’re all settled.” 

Mako would see Sawyer many times his freshman year – always bearing yellow fruit, on the way to make lemonade for someone. He would watch  _ The Wizard of Oz _ with Jem – making use of the shitty twenty-five-inch TV Quick brought from home and eating lightly buttered popcorn on the rock-hard couch lent to them by the university – and the two of them would playfully compete over their childhood traumas on their first night away from their mothers, Jem saying, “One time I lived in a stranger’s garage for two weeks because my mum and I got kicked out of our flat for nonpayment.”

Munching caprinely on his popcorn, Mako pushed his legs a little against Jem’s and muttered, “That’s fucked up.”

“Yeah.”

“One time, my mum threw me into a bathtub full of near-boiling water. That was before I actually liked taking baths, so it was awful and overwhelming and I thought she was going to drown me.”

Jem looked at him through a darkness mediated by nothing but the television’s flickering blue illumination and Judy Garland rainbow songs. The glare on the lenses of his glasses made his gaze nothing but glowing, opaque whiteness. He said, “I’m sorry.”

“Pssh, don’t be.” Mako had learned flippancy where his abuse was concerned some time before, along with some manner of strategic communication and his trigonometric identities. “It happened like a million years ago.”

Then they were silent. The Gale house blew away in a twister and the whole world became lovely and Technicolor. Classes would not start in two days; Jem nudged Mako’s right calf with his left knee and asked him, “D’you wanna go on a ride?”

“Yeah, let’s go.”

As Jem gathered up his car keys and Mako slipped a pair of two-dollar jandals on, Jem said, “One time my mum brought me to a party where grown-ass people were like, doing shrooms and shit, and I sat in the bathroom and cried for two hours while she made out with this guy I never saw again.”

“Oh my God!” Mako cried. He put his hands on Jem’s face. “I’m so sorry, my, my poor little baby–”

“Shut up.” Jem slapped him away and dragged him out the door. “You’re such an asshole.”

They drove all the way to Porirua to sit in the car and listen to Coldplay and The Cranberries for an hour and a half, bullshitting, laughing in the dark, talking about everything touched by internal moonlight. Mako slept on the ride back to the dormitory, crawled into bed at one in the morning feeling clean and somber and filled up inside with steam. His life, always straining for some sort of structure and always suffering to be confined within it, became dominated by cycles: the waking up at 8:00 in the morning for Survey of Western Art at 9:30 on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; the going down for a nap at noon for two hours before getting up in time for Intro to Creative Writing at 3:00; the Tuesday and Thursday lunch dates with his roommates in the student center; their square dancing into and out of the shower at night – Jem first, wasting all the hot water; then Mako, because he had no patience to wait for the third or fourth shift; then Quick, who had good timing and usually spent only fifteen minutes under the spray; then Stu, who had an almost depressively kind and acquiescing nature and was more than happy to go last. In the heat of the year’s start, Mako wore gym shorts and not much else and did his art history homework in bed while Jem played guitar only a yard or so away, strumming the strings softly so as not to disturb. Wide awake in the middle of the night, he smoked cigarettes out on the fire escape and pooled loneliness in his hands and in the divot at the bottom of his cranial cavity, touching its stickiness with his fingertips, idly smelling it. Popping Adderall in the mornings with his coffee made with Jem’s piece of shit percolator, he made sarcastic small talk with his professors and charmed them with his eccentric, mostly self-cultivated sort of braininess, his willingness to learn and not take himself very seriously while doing it. Standing in the university gift shop, he helped Stu look for a postcard with a nice view of the Wellington harbor on it to send to the other’s parents.

“Why not send them this one?” he asked. “This kiwi is so cute.”

“My parents know what a kiwi looks like,” Stu replied in his soft, humdrum sort of voice. He examined a postcard with a photo of the Adam Art Gallery on it; Mako leaned against a shelf containing dark green coffee mugs emblazoned with the university’s logo in white. 

“What are they like?”

“My parents?” Stu, whose face looked always babyish and velvety soft, glanced at Mako evenly, his expression indicating nothing but faint, modest surprise. “They’re nice. They play chess together. They own their house.”

“They own their house?” Mako echoed somewhat mockingly, his words fracturing into laughter.

“Well, Mako, I don’t know what you want to know.” Finally, near the back of one stack of postcards, Stu found the harbor and pulled it out to hold it in his hands. “They’re just people, you know.”

“Are they normal like you?”

Stu nodded a little and gave Mako a small smile. “Yeah.”

Mako adored Stu for this – this normalcy. He wanted to meet the other’s parents. He wanted to walk all around the house that they owned.

When they stepped up to the register and the cashier – a perky blonde girl with a Marilyn Monroe shock of blood red lips and a Jayne Mansfield paleness to her short, curled hair – pronounced fifty-eight cents for the price of the postcard, Mako stilled Stu’s hand and reached into his own pocket for his wallet. Stu looked at him a little weirdly, but said, “Thanks, bro.”

“It’s just fifty-eight cents.”

“Still… thanks.”

That night, Mako ate macaroni and cheese slightly burnt in the microwave while standing up in the kitchen, listening to Jem and Quick talk about the history exam for their Theatre in Context class in the living room.

“I got a sixty-eight on my paper.”

“She posted grades?!”

“Yeah, you didn’t know?”

“You got a sixty-eight?! I probably got a two!”

“You didn’t get a two, Quick. I bombed because I rushed it. ‘Twas too busy smoking up with Mako the night before.”

“I feel left out. You guys need to tell me when you do that.”

“Why, so you can cock up your papers like me?”

“It’s not like I came to university to actually learn anything. I’m just here so I’m employable for the rest of my life.”

Mako raised his head with a mouthful of macaroni and yelled, “I heard that, bro!”

Jem and Quick looked over the back of the couch at him, their faces full of love and amusement, respectively. Mako smiled an abhorrent, cheesy smile at them and continued to stuff his face until the abysmal, gaping maw of near-perpetual hunger within him ceased to shriek quite so loudly; afterward, he laid around in bed doing nothing until Jem came to ask him what they were doing that night, a Wednesday.

“Stephani told me about a party at somebody’s flat by my old house,” Mako said into his pillow, kicking his feet some where they poked out from beneath the bottom hem of his  _ koru _ quilt. “She thinks it’s a frat thing but they’re probably not going to turn us wee freshmen away.” 

About three hours later, he was dressed in paisley and he and Jem were picking up Stephani in the parking lot by the dorms, watching her climb into the Rabbit with her long, Maori hair swinging with every motion and butterflies embroidered on the back right pocket of her low-rider jeans.

“What’s up, dudes?” she asked. Stephani was a theatre/film studies double major of vaguely ursine build who shared all of her classes with Jem and had spent an embarrassing number of nights since the beginning of the semester drinking Mako into dumb-blind stupors, him trying to show her up and regularly proving himself unable to hold his own against her iron stomach and astronomical tolerance. Despising her roommate, who played Christian rock through every morning routine without fail and talked incessantly about the beauty of all equine animals, she spent the majority of her extracurricular time in the boys’ apartment, playing video games with Jem and squeezing into Mako’s bed beside him at night to sleep – the two of them touching, of course, but only because it was necessary and because the quantities of alcohol they consumed every evening increased the level of physical comfort between them. Naturally, she was very much loved by Mako and Jem. Mako reached a hand into the backseat and grinned when their palms slapped together in a low five.

“I have a research paper due in two days and I haven’t written or read a single word.” He adopted an expression of gentle insouciance. “Things are good.”

“Glad to hear it,” Stephani replied with her typical instantaneous sarcasm. “Always great to know that my boy is working hard.”

The night passed in a blur of sound and color. There were Solo cups and kids in ties on the front steps of 9 Rimu Road. Cramped into a space of two-hundred square meters was well over a hundred students, screaming into one another’s faces over the cacophony of American rap music and spilling beer on the hardwood as they maneuvered around other warm bodies, asking for jungle juice and Yeastie Boys at the table in the kitchen that had been repurposed as a bar and doing little shuffle-foot dances in the so-called “free space” in the living room. It was utterly boring and pathetically conventional, but drinks were a dollar a pop so our friends hung around for a little over an hour – Stephani hoarding beers and bullying her way into the game of champagne pong being played out on the terrace; Mako chatting with sorority girls who called his complexion “hot” and “brown” in tones that made him moderately uncomfortable; Jem awkwardly drifting around without talking to anyone in particular, mostly just hovering in Mako’s vicinity and sipping on shitty sangria. At 10:34 PM, they bounced to pick up a six-pack of Speight’s from Mena’s Convenience Store and then poked their heads into another party, this one happening in Sawyer’s room – Sawyer mixing drinks in the kitchen, juicing lemons, saying, “There they are – my favorite kids,” when he saw Mako and Jem’s pretty faces. There, they drank. There, a girl with Victoria Beckham hair sold them a gram of cocaine for seventy dollars. There, Mako and Stephani played spoons while drunk and laughed high and loud into the night while Jem sequestered himself somewhere by the kitchen and read one of Sawyer’s biology textbooks until his anxiety drove him to find Mako sprawled out on the floor making hyena noises and say, “Hey, I’m going home.”

“What? Noooo, don’t leave.” Mako tried to pick himself up and only ended up floundering around on his stomach like a beached shark, giggling. “Don’t leave, we’re… we’re having so much fun.”

“I’m tired. It’s Thursday now.”

At this utterance, Mako looked at Jem and his closed off, kind of dejected expression. He saw the mosaic configuration of shapes rippling over Jem’s face and a hazel hardness the texture and consistency of enamel. He reached up for Jem’s arms for leverage. “Help me get up and I’ll come with you.”

“I’ll come with you, too,” Stephani said from where she sat next to Mako, and farted loudly. She laughed so hard tears sprung to her eyes. “I’m– I’m gonna fuckin’ kill myself!”

Stumbling to the kitchen to get a drink for the road, Mako pushed the Styrofoam cooler out of the doorway until its side caved in and ice, water, and orange cans of Tui beer poured out in a frigid gush that coated Mako’s jandaled feet. Inebriated, Mako saw the outpour as a clear river, a miniaturized Bay of Plenty. He grabbed a can from the floor, said, “Oops,” and let Jem take him and Stephani out of there before anyone could say anything about the mess.

Back in the apartment, Stephani drooled with her face down on Mako’s mattress and her fat ass popped a little into the air, her jeans discarded at the foot of the bed and her bubblegum pink underwear exposed for all the world to see. Mako and Jem coked out for the next two hours and laid together on the floor of the living room under an unwashed blanket snatched out of the laundry pile and with pillows taken from Jem’s bed, their own pants and shoes off and Mako stripped down to his boxers. 

“M’sorry we stayed out so late,” Mako slurred after snorting the last line of the evening. They still had half a gram left and would save it for the coming Friday. 

Jem shook his head at the ceiling. “It’s okay.”

“Can I ask you something?” When Jem looked at him, saying yes with his eyes, he continued. “Why do you go out with me when you like, hate it? When you actually hate it so much?”

“I don’t hate it,” Jem mumbled with an unconvincing solemnity.

“You don’t  _ like _ it.”

“Not after thirty minutes, no.” Jem sighed. The darkness of the room seemed to knit them together, tying a knot between their separate bodies. “I don’t know, it’s weird.”

“You can tell me,” Mako said, whispering for reasons that escaped him. Maybe he didn’t want to disturb Quick and Stu in their room, only two yards away. Maybe he didn’t want to disturb Jem, only four inches away. “I won’t judge you. You’re like, my best friend.”

Jem blinked sweetly at him, almost feline in that moment. Adoration yawned between them. “I like watching you have fun,” Jem murmured. “I don’t want you to not have fun, or like, have fun with me not around.”

This, at 2:47 in the moonlit morning, made Mako smile and laugh into the lukewarmth of the night. He and Jem drifted off together and did not get up for their film theory class approximately four hours later as they should have, as Mako’s mother would have wanted him to. When Mako eventually woke at around noon, Jem still slept hard beside him, back turned to him and legs curled up beneath the blanket they shared. Mako’s head weighed eight tons, so he pulled himself to his feet, carefully stepped over Jem’s body, and went to make the awful coffee with the awful percolator. He was very much alive and awake at this moment in his life.

Today, on April 19 th , 2025, he is less so. In fact, when he passes through the automatic sliding doors of the Walgreens on Elysian Fields with Jem at his side, he feels less alive and awake than he has felt in twenty years. 

There was no real requirement for both of them to show up to this miniature shopping trip, truth be told. Only one shopper would have been more than sufficient. There’s something slightly ceremonial about the trip, however, it being taken in preparation of their agreed upon sex date and the first time they’ve gone on a supply run in about three months now. They can practically feel the mundane specialness of it all floating in the air.

“I wish they had an aisle reserved specifically for sex products,” Mako says kind of loudly, causing a vaguely pubescent girl to look at him bug-eyed and his marginal sense of shame to inflate only slightly. “I hate walking all over the store looking for the tiny nook where they keep condoms and the tinier nook where they keep lube.”

Jem waits until they’ve walked together to an empty aisle and near the back of the store to reach out and hook his and Mako’s pinkies together. “That would be too much like the right thing to do, love,” he says, and because a bona fide “love” is a rare one for Jem, Mako can’t help but grin even as he tries to school his face into inexpression befitting the public setting. 

They find the Astroglide Personal Water-Based Lubricant and the Wet Premium Platinum Lubricant and the K-Y Personal Water-Based Lubricant Jelly in all variations of size and specific purpose. While Mako pretends to give a shit about the minuscule differences between each brand and estimates based on past experience how long an individual four-ounce, five-ounce, eight-ounce, or whopping one-hundred and twenty-eight ounce container will last them, Jem loops long arms around his body from behind, a mere inch or so of space between them for the sake of decency, breath hitting Mako in the back of his neck, tickling him, exciting him. He wants Jem to say, “fuck it” and just hold him flush. Feeling bold and too tired to care more about potential bystanders, he steps back further into Jem’s personal space and lets the whole expanse of his back, buttocks, and thighs touch to Jem’s chest, pelvis, and thighs, lets their skin commune about an hour and a half too early through their clothes, lets himself enjoy Jem’s caught breath and the nose nuzzling into his hair, the public privacy of it all, their deceptive aloneness. He decides on Astroglide and then takes Jem’s hand to lead him across the store to Trojans, LifeStyles, and Durexes, oh my.

While they wait in line for the register behind a family of four and a single woman with barrettes all over her pretty blonde head, Jem utters at a volume intended only for Mako, “You think the cashier will assume we’re straight?”

Mako looks between them – him holding the Astroglide, Jem the condoms, him wearing his striped cat sweater, Jem in a pale pink beanie. He throws his head back and laughs. “Right!”

Later, when they get home, Jem goes straight upstairs with the bag of provisions while Mako stays downstairs and makes small talk with Mum for a little while – discussing the program currently on TV, something in the vein of  _ The Bachelorette _ but somehow, some way, even more idiotic. When he finally arrives in the bedroom, Jem is just sitting on the bed, watching the door with an air of calm and eager waiting. They gaze wordlessly at each other for a prolonged, comfortable moment. Mako closes the door.

“You ready?” Jem asks, almost laughing.

“Yeah.” Mako reaches for the drawstring of his joggers. “Let’s do this.” 

Before he can blink, Jem is there, pulling his hands away from his waistband and tugging at the elastic himself. As Mako melts his mouth against Jem’s chin and jaw, it occurs to him that this is only natural – Jem doing always for him, always taking everything out of his hands, always there to help. He loves this; loves Jem in such an enduring, almost boring way; and this – the permanence and the utter mundanity of his affection – he loves as well. It is what he wants, and, to his continuing surprise, he has it.

He is whiny sometimes. Jem doesn’t mind. In fact, Mako sometimes suspects that Jem prefers it, when he is grinding Mako’s hips down into the mattress and circling himself at the inner nexus that makes Mako all tight and coiled like a spring ready to decompress, prefers that the responding sound is something high and kind of desperate. Jem gets off on desperation. This is the only way things between them could ever work, as Mako is nothing if not a desperate creature. There is also the laughter, when things are really good and fun, when Mako will hold Jem against him and their rocking together or the brush of Jem’s hair along the side of his face or the odd touch of their heaving stomachs tickles one or both of them, when the wet kiss brings with it happiness, when the end is nigh. There are the uncanny moments when Jem is fucking him and Mako thinks to himself, distracted sometimes as he will always inevitably become during the course of literally any activity, that this man holding his hand and kissing him silly is the same dorky boy who used to follow him puppylike around parties and proselytize about the academic merit of graphic novels while drunk or high or some scary combination of both; this man is his best friend, who he kept himself away from for so long because he was scared to death to lose what was always destined to be lost between them by virtue of the sheer passing of time; this man loves him and, through some sick cosmic joke, he doesn’t and will probably never understand why; this man has a hand on his face and is asking him, “Are you there?”

“Yeah.” Mako laughs and arches his spine inward, bringing their bodies closer together, letting their foreheads touch. “Was just thinking.”

“Only you would start thinking during sex.”

“Mmm, you love me.” Mako kisses Jem wetly, openmouthed. “Make me not think, make me–”

Jem reaches down and puts a hand on his dick. This, to no one’s surprise, does the trick for a little while.

Mako is brought into a wedding in the New Orleans autumn, the week of wild monkey sex preceding the actual day of. He and Jem are perfectly simpatico and have, through their collective efforts in a ninety-dollar per-person class called Telepathy for Lovers given at a mystic squatter’s house in the Tremé, acquired the ability to read each other’s minds and have naturally put their powers to good use in the bedroom – getting off on each other’s pleasure, wordlessly whispering  _ more _ s,  _ harder _ s and  _ yes _ es into the shared psychic space between them. After much taste-testing and the realization of the romantic ideal of perfect intuition, they order a wedding cake from Bywater Bakery: a four-tiered chocolate marble cheesecake with brownie bases and a topping of fresh strawberries. For good measure, they fill the refrigerator with extra berries and eat them on the kitchen floor, kissing each other at every moment in which their mouths are free of fruit, loving the thing of it so much and so hard it is almost impossible to stand.

_ IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou _ , goes the stream of thought between them – perfect conduit of adoration, their mouths crammed full of red berry mush and tongue.  _ IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou _ .

Godfrey wants to throw Mako a bachelor party. Mako doesn’t understand it but he does not argue against it. The night before the wedding – during which the specter of Mum comes to him in the shower, transparent, saying, “The earth hath bubbles, as the water has,” and “What’s it all about, Alfie?” – Mako is taken to some nondescript Bourbon Street bar and danced, drank, and snorted into oblivion. He and KC twirl and bop together in the standing room to the syrup outpour of jazz music, clinging to each other with a sort of deathlike hysteria, kissing. In the unisex bathroom, June strokes fingers through Mako’s hair and cuts up a line of coke for him, singing that song she wrote as a he in college, “ _ Maddie cut a lot for meeee _ ,” and he is brought right back to university, dirty restrooms, Aroha, his pre-diagnosis bravado. The night calls for champagne and tequila, which they all drink by the bottle and the shot glass and swim around in in a pool on a hotel roof somewhere in heaven. Mako doesn’t know how he ever came across friends so unconditionally loving. 

“You’re happy, right?” Godfrey asks him while they kick back by the poolside, swinging their feet around in sticky golden bubbly. Mako, crossfaded, hears nothing but sweet buzzing.

“What?”

“I said, you’re happy, right?!” There is Godfrey’s hand, caressing the side of his face and bringing him in to lean against a perfect shoulder, a perfect chest. “That’s the only reason why you’d be doing this.”

“Getting married or partying with you?”

Godfrey grins, says, “Yes.”

Mako raises his head and smushes his mouth against his friend’s stubbled chin. Godfrey flicks his tongue out and licks Mako’s nose, like an animal. It is so weird, so nice, so impossible and conceptually wrong that it almost jars Mako out of the fantasy entirely. He leans with it, rocks with it. He goes home in an Uber and finds Jem waiting for him in bed, naked, pliant, ready. After the drunken-high frenzy of their lovemaking, they sleep in damp sheets and Mako reaches through the invisible veil to hold hands with Mum – her coexisting so closely with this final, horrific change in his life, whispering to him in  _ te reo  _ and bending his fingers back until they break. In the morning, he rouses Jem for the celebratory second line in the French Quarter, in which they dance down the street with dark-skinned trumpet players and drink craft beer from each other’s plastic cups with Kory being pulled along in a great big perambulator behind them, sucking on a gigantic pacifier, dressed to the nines in a tailored velvet shift dress and high-heeled shoes.

Mako’s joy is constant and unbearable. It is the kind of joy he wanted for himself when he was twenty, when he didn’t know anything about himself. 

The wedding comes after. It is a formal, nighttime affair. Harrah’s in the Central Business District is the venue. The lush, moist warmth of a Crescent City fall is the climate. Dark and colorful silk suits and shoes with scarlet soles are the dress code for the grooms. In an opulent, frankly ridiculous hotel room before the ceremony, Mako gives Jem a blowjob and only barely succeeds in keeping semen from spattering on his suit.

“You’re so messy,” Jem remarks, laughing, pushing his fingers through Mako’s silver hair. 

“I hate you so much,” Mako croaks as he gags. “What do you even eat?” Tucking Jem back into his pants, Mako heads for the bathroom the size of their bedroom at home. “I’m brushing my teeth.”

“Well, hurry up. We’re getting married in a minute if you hadn’t noticed.”

“Two seconds, babe!” Mako squirts the cinnamon toothpaste onto one of the cheapo complimentary toothbrushes left by the sink and runs scalding water from the faucet. “Two seconds!”

Two seconds later, it’s time to get fucking married.

Like they’re stars in the end-of-movie montage of some supremely irrelevant romantic comedy, he and Jem dance each other down the aisle. Mum, though dead, has done them the favor of getting herself ordained so that she may officiate their wedding. There she stands in a long, floral muumuu at the end of the aisle, with a worm eating its way out of her left eye socket and a veneer of concealer, mascara, and lipstick spread over her face. Her teeth falling out, the skin pulled taut over her skull and ashen with nonlife, she asks the congregation (which includes Tatum and Quick but not, by the way, Loren, Blaise, or baby Jeannie, the little one having fallen violently ill the night before the flight to New Orleans), “If any of you has a reason why these two should not be married, speak now or forever hold your peace.”

Seconds pass.

Not a word is said.

Mum parts her rotting, purplish lips to pronounce Mako and Jem newly married.

From the back of the room, Cassidy steps forward and says, “Fuck this,” and in his shock and honest to God glee, Mako bursts into laughter – laughs, like Stephani, so hard he nearly cries. 

Cassidy is a Greek idol come to life; Michelangelo’s David cast in gold and built like a brick shithouse. He stands in the aisle with his long blond hair spilling loose over the statuesque breadth of his shoulders and back, looks Mako in the face and tells him in a voice that is not his voice – sounds more like Aroha’s, upon closer inspection – “This isn’t you. None of this is you. What is life if you’re not trying to be perfectly, breathtakingly happy?”

“But I  _ am _ happy,” Mako says.

Cassidy’s voice becomes his own – sweet Australian drawl, dulcet and warm enough to melt marble. “Does he make your stomach flip?”

“He holds my head at night.”

“Does he get under your skin, though? Does he make you wild?”

Mako looks at Jem, and Jem looks at him. He’s never seen another person who looks at him like Jem does.

He runs away. There’s something that feels so good about dragging the blade of life against his skin until he bleeds, about catching Cassidy by the hand and the mouth and disappearing with him into the indigo New Orleans night, Jem tossing the wedding cake out onto the asphalt dark of Poydras Street after them, red strawberry spill. For a year, Mako doesn’t quite know why he would do such a thing as fuck Cassidy Villiers on the night of his wedding; why he would move with Cassidy and Kory into a smaller house in Mid-City and quit his job and live his life like some kind of alcoholic housewife, drinking bottles of Moscato whole, cooking dinner at night and feeding it to Cassidy with his bare hands. He doesn’t know why he would keep Tatum and Quick’s wedding present – a gramophone from the 1930s on which he plays Ella Fitzgerald while dancing around the house and sipping glasses of Merlot – for two whole months before sending it back with a note of lukewarm apology. He doesn’t know why he would continue to see Jem in the afterhours after breaking their relationship into thirty irregular pieces, sleeping in hotel rooms with Jem wrapped around him in the blue-violet evening, holding his head at night like Jem always would and always will. He doesn’t know why he’d call Cassidy the love of his life in the aftermath of it all, except he does. Cassidy makes his stomach flip. He gets all the way underneath his skin, makes him wild with sexual frenzy and unadulterated adoration.

“I see him, you know,” Cassidy tells Mako one night, pulling his hands down Mako’s bare body beneath the covers in bed. “I recognize his car when he drives in circles around the block and passes by the house, over and over again.”

“He’s still in love with me, Cass,” Mako says with a voice that manages to be both noncommittal and deeply sincere. “We almost got married, in case you forgot.”

“But you didn’t.” Cassidy brings their mouths together, and like always – the transformation automatic, biochemical – Mako is metamorphosed into human jelly and made thick with lust. “You came back to me,” Cassidy says, and this is so funny – so fucking out of the realm of possibility, Cassidy being possibly the most emotionally constipated man Mako has ever met – that thirteen months into the reinstatement of their relationship, Mako spikes Cassidy’s dinner with arsenic and cries when his head hits the plate and shatters ceramic, blood pooling over the tabletop, the suitcases packed and in the car already. Mako dips his head and puts his mouth close to Cassidy’s soon-to-be-deaf left ear.

“I know we could be so happy, baby,” he murmurs. “If we wanted to be.”

He and Kory move to Tahiti. Jem follows them in a chartered airplane. Eaten up by his homicidal guilt, Mako becomes a Polynesian Sleeping Beauty and eats black sand straight off of the beach in between week-long naps and the feather-flutter of Jem’s kisses pressed into his eyelids. After fifty-three weeks and no phone calls from Mum, the Feds, or his dead Australian love, he drifts off into the Pacific Ocean on a boat built for one. The Big Dipper is visible and the stars seem to shine forever. He was always meant to be alone, in a cocoon of his own idiotic making. He is never seen again, and somehow, he prefers it this way.

They called him Sleeping Beauty way back when, by virtue of his good looks and propensity toward napping at any given time of the day. Mako remembers the end of his first semester at Victoria U, when finals so overwhelmed him that when he was not grinding his way through thirty-minute panic attacks and trying to medicate the full-bodied heat and hyperventilation with cannabis and Benadryl – or, of course, writing papers and taking exams in class, still very much in overdrive mode – he was fast asleep in the twin-size leased to him by the university, glued to the bed, wrapped in blankets and working his ass off trying to approximate a deathlike state. The Saturday before the last week of examinations, he stepped in broken glass on the bathroom floor after Quick had shattered the jar of toothbrushes left on the countertop and failed to adequately clean up the mess. Bloodied foot wrapped in toilet paper, Mako just got back in bed and dipped into slumber – this his primary coping mechanism for when life turned out to be too much to handle.

Forty-five minutes later, he woke to Jem’s hand on his head – the only visible part of his body besides his injured foot. 

“Whaaa–?” Mako turned his head, smushed his face into Jem’s palm.

“What happened to your foot, bro?” Jem seemed to disappear in Mako’s closed-eye, half-asleep state, but then there were hands on his foot, inadvertently pressing tiny fragments of glass deeper into the skin.

“ _ Shit! _ ”

“Fuck, I’m sorry!” When Mako opened his eyes and sat up, Jem was sitting on his bed and looking at him, holding his wounded extremity in his lap as one held a spooked animal or a piece of fine china. Mako, with his hair an ovine mess atop his head, released an expansive, somewhat feline yawn.

“It’s glass.” He wrestled himself halfway out of his blanket chrysalis and sighed at the coolness of the room’s air against his bare skin. “I was too lazy to clean it out.”

Jem gave him a stern look that he thoroughly deserved. “You could get an infection, you daft cunt.”

“Ooh, that’s a mean one for you. How did your math test go?”

Jem shook his head. “Let’s not talk about it.” He smoothed a hand over the top of Mako’s foot tenderly, almost lovingly. “Come and let me clean your foot.”

“I can do it myself,” Mako argued with kneejerk, reflexive male tenacity.

“But you won’t, will you?”

This, Mako could not help but admit to be true. Jem helped him get out of bed, put some jandals on, and limp into the bathroom, where he stood up in the shower while Jem rinsed his foot with water and hydrogen peroxide, their first aid supplies being pathetically meager in those days. Jem picked the shards of glass from Mako’s sole with his fingernails – bearing his  _ ow _ s, his swearing of oaths and his heaving breaths. After tying a towel around the now-clean foot, Mako put some winter clothes on and they hopped in the Rabbit to drive around Wellington for a while, listening to the angriest music they could find in Jem’s CD collection (which turned out, kind of pathetically, to be a Foo Fighters album from 1997). Jem didn’t talk and Mako didn’t talk, and when the latter’s breath came fast and the world started to spin a little – the onslaught of mosaic sight, two-dimensional everything, heat licking up his stomach into his esophagus and the inside of his back and chest – Jem pulled the car over onto the curb and looked at him and asked, “Are you alright?”

“I’m just–” Mako was so hot inside that he could hardly speak. “I don’t know, I can’t breathe.”

Jem put his hand on Mako’s back and rubbed up to the nape of his neck, Mako’s forehead pressed into the dashboard, the engine growling loud in the Rabbit’s advancing age. “Shh,” Jem soothed, because this he was familiar with – this nonsense of Mako’s, this anxiety that seemed to spring like bubbles or foam out of absolutely nothing. There was no answer Mako could give that would make any sense, and still Jem asked, “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know.”

“What can I do?”

“I don’t know, I–” Mako sobbed a little. “I’m, I can’t.”

“Do you want to go back? Back to the dorm?”

“I don’t want to go anywhere, I just. I don’t – can you keep driving?”

Jem kept driving. He held Mako’s hand and they never told anyone about this.

By then, the guys’ apartment had become a sort of home. They’d instituted a chores wheel (which was magneted to the fridge and turned once every week) and designated specific timeslots during which each roommate was entitled to full control of the television. They ate dinner together with an adult, settled sort of regularity, shared with one another the gripping minutiae of their classes and social lives. They made a point not to forget to tell one another goodnight, as without this courtesy living together would have simply been meaningless, anonymous coexistence. On Sundays, the extended family known as the Wellington Teasippers congregated at the apartment to watch rugby and drink Speight’s and plan their next foray into the hearts of local theatregoers.

“Hello, hello, hello!” Tatum cried out into the living room as she shouldered her way inside the day after the glass-in-foot, panic-in-Rabbit ordeal, carrying a six-pack of beers and wearing a tangerine-colored sweater that looked like shag carpet. Since the beginning of the semester, she had declared a double major in theatre and English writing; cut her hair to a length that only just touched beneath her jaws and began straightening it on a daily basis; broken up with Mako so that she could “discover herself with other people” and “find out who she was without him”; and risen two-thirds of the way up the student body’s social hierarchy due to her fearless implementation of a retro, hippie-adjacent sartorial style and her general gregariousness, her friendliness that knew no bounds. 

Stephani, Stu, and Quick – the only three in the living room at that moment – looked up upon her entrance. “Hey, girl!” Stephani piped up, making grabby hands at the beer. “I thought Loren was coming with you.”

“Yeah, well, I did too.” Tatum passed the case of beer off to Quick, who took a bottle before passing it again off to Stephani. Putting her hands on her hips in a show of mild vexation, Tatum said, “She was supposed to sleep in the room last night, but of course, she decided to stay over at Blaise’s again. He’s going to drop her off in a little bit.”

Quick fiddled dumbly around with the cap on his beer bottle, twisting and tugging at it in vain. “They’re going to get married, aren’t they? I can feel it.” He stuck the bottle cap in his mouth and pried at it with his teeth until Tatum swatted his fuzzy, feathery head, spurring him to give her a look of wide-eyed astonishment and ask, “What?”

“Don’t fucking do that! You’ll break your teeth!”

“Well, the bottle opener is in the kitchen and that’s so far away.” Quick raised his head and his voice. “Jeremiah! Can you get me the bottle opener?!”

From his and Mako’s room, Jem yelled back, “Why, are your hands broken?!”

Halfway through the exchange, Stu rose to his feet to get the implement himself. Still, Quick kept yelling – “Yes and also I’ve very recently, uh, developed a condition, uh. It’s called laziness, and it’s spreading like wildfire in here!”

“Clearly! Otherwise I wouldn’t have to do all the bitch work in this house!” Jem emerged into the communal living space and, seeing both Tatum and Stephani as well as Stu fetching the bottle opener from the utensil drawer, said, “Thanks, Stu. Sorry, girls, for the, uh… the bitch comment.”

Stephani deadpanned at Tatum. “He’s such a bitch.”

Tatum laughed her high, honking donkey laugh. She came over to give Jem an overly affectionate hug and a kiss, to ask him, “Where’s Mako?”

“In there.” Jem’s voice had lowered a bit as he’d said this, as he’d indicated their shared bedroom with a jerk of his thumb. “He’s sleeping.”

“Sleeping?!” Tatum shook her head and marched with an almost military resolve into the room. “Not on family Sunday. Not on my watch.”

By the time Tatum threw herself into bed with him, Mako had already heard her coming, had heard her raucous entrance into the apartment and some of the bottle opener fracas in the few minutes before. Still, he made a noise of faint surprise at the weight of her body falling atop his, not quite crushing him; he said into his pillow, “What the fuck.”

“Get up! Get up, get up, get up!” Tatum wiggled around on top of him and wrapped her arms around him through his blankets, her thighs bracketing his hips, her mouth near the top of his head. She pulled at his afghan, quilt, and comforter until his face became revealed to her. “Your family is here, baby Mako. We’re all dying to see you.”

Mako blinked tiredly at her and yawned. “I still don’t know how we all decided  _ I’m  _ the baby.”

“Or how I’m the mum and Stephani’s the dad,” Jem remarked as he passed back into the room, to grab his guitar and probably to eavesdrop.

Tatum played with the hair curling like a dark halo around Mako’s face, smiling down at him and more than content with the easy press of their bodies together, their physical closeness that was as natural and as desirable as anything. “What are you doing sleeping, huh? It’s family Sunday. We can’t have that without you, and I’ve got pizza money, and the All Blacks are on tonight.”

“I’m just tired, Tate,” Mako uttered with a sigh. He wanted to kiss her, but he knew she was dating some international student from Sweden named Axel and that they were “semi-serious” based on the report given to him by Loren two weeks prior. “I’m always tired.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Tatum tugged on a curl until it stretched out taut and straight. “You know you can talk about this stuff with me, right?”

“I’ve been too tired.” Mako laughed, a broken record. “It’s so much easier to just go to bed.”

Tatum frowned, then lowered her head until her cheek pressed against Mako’s. They laid together like that, half-cuddling and wordless, until Loren showed up ten minutes after Jami (who brought crisps), Deacon (who brought two-liter bottles of L&P), and Rhys (who brought nothing but his own ugly, perpetually scowling mug) and poked her head into the room to say, “Hey, kids. We’re powwowing in five so you might want to get up.”

“Okay, Loren,” they said in unison. Tatum stayed and sat on the bed while Mako dug a sweatshirt out of his closet. After he put it on, she reached out and pulled him to her by it until he was sandwiched between her thighs and could feel the warmth emanating from her through her sweater. His confusion was evident on his face.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said. She hugged him and blew cool air against his ear. “Let’s go.”

That night, after supreme pizza, victorious All Blacks, and a jam session that lasted late into the night, she slept in his bed wearing her panties and one of his T-shirts. They didn’t have sex, but when Mako turned to pull her into his arms, she came diving in for his mouth, hooking her legs around him, stroking his hair back away from his face and telling him, “I love you, you know that?” while the rest of the party trickled to a close the next room over, the faint sounds of laughter drifting through the wall.

For winter break, the Wellington Teasippers staged a successful and much-loved production of  _ The Bridges of Madison County _ . Unwilling to go back to living in his mother’s house – back to emotional abuse and the omnipresent threat of either experiencing or witnessing a nervous breakdown – Mako spent the three weeks between semesters living in Jem’s and Tatum’s parents’ houses, sharing his friends’ beds and volunteering to make breakfast at least three mornings a week. There was something about sitting in Wellington coffee shops, wearing Tatum’s moonstone pendant necklace and Jem’s skinny blue jeans and powering through a script that he would either submit as an assignment for his second semester scriptwriting class or otherwise direct as a Teasippers show, that seemed to define that winter for Mako, him always either on Adderall or cannabis, him eating Indian takeaway with his friends, him the baby in the Teasippers family tree, him carrying Tatum around on his back while they perused convenience stores for ice blocks and rum. Jem bought their treats with his mother’s rich artist money. They went back to his place and slid around the kitchen floor in wooly socks. On the trampoline in the backyard, Tatum and Mako jumped and kissed and shivered and sang songs to Jem while he showered with the bathroom window open. While Jem walked around his bedroom in nothing but a towel, searching for clean clothes and humming to himself, Mako and Tatum made playful commentary about his body:

“Ooh, look at that chest hair,” Tatum cooed.

“So virile,” Mako said, and laughed when Jem gave him a V-sign.

“My favorite part is the Adonis lines.”

“Couldn’t you just eat him up, Tate?”

“I could.” Tatum reached to give Jem’s towel a tug and began howling when it fell away to reveal his bare bottom, Jem grabbing the article and holding it up before anything else compromising could be exposed.

“I fucking hate you guys,” he said, throwing a shoe at them as they laughed and rolled around on his bed. He disappeared into his closet. “You can get out now!” he yelled through the closed door. “Friendship cards have been revoked!”

Mako gazed at Tatum in her laughter, in her overriding, high-pitched mirth. He loved her so much exactly like this, exactly the way she was.

When the new semester started, Tatum began seeing a mathematics major named Ohad Spock and Mako, who had somewhat expected this, still found his heart broken. When he went with Jem to the New World on Willis Street to buy cleaning supplies and snack foods for the months to come, he picked up a bouquet of daisies with which to make crowns for himself and his roommates. Back in the apartment, he sat on the living room floor and threaded the daisy stems together while Jem stored the cookies, crisps, and crackers in various kitchen cabinets. Jem eventually came over to survey his progress.

“The flowers are too far apart,” he observed.

“Watch me not make you one,” Mako replied. He wore his flower crown until it wilted into nothing.

The morning after their designated sex date, Mako and Jem change the sheets. They dump the midnight blue sex linens into the laundry hamper in the bathroom and exchange for them crisp, gray sheets made of jersey cotton, the fabric pleasantly stretchy as they pull it across the mattress, tucking and smoothing and afterwards, before putting the comforter back on the bed, lying together and just staring at the ceiling, breathing in the scent of laundry detergent and refreshed novelty.

Mako goes downstairs to work on an article. The writing comes like teeth pulled one by one out of his skull with Oamaru pliers, his brain a lemon begging to be juiced – drained of rambling thoughts about the neighborhood, growing up, growing pains, everything swirling twisterlike and kind of lazy around in his brain.

#    
  


> at least once a day my daughter will come to me, waving some portion of her body around for my inspection. “there’s a dot on my hand!” she says or “I feel something on the back of my head” or “I’m trying to look at the bottom of my foot, can you look for me?” and then some crazy bullshit comes flying out of her mouth immediately following – “I’m afraid I have melanoma” or the gem from last week “there is a parasitic worm in my brain”
> 
> I used to ask my mother “what the hell do you let her watch on tv while I’m at work?”
> 
> I got a thirty-minute diatribe about the state of American television programming
> 
> part of me thinks I should quit my job and stay with my girl all the time, but then we’d buy no groceries and would starve. also, this is not the point. when my fifteen year old child thinks she has cancer, it is not really about her television habits and my admittedly limited supervision of them. it is about how secure she feels and the particular degree of fear she feels towards her own body and the world, which seems like it is a lot. this is a natural part of growing up and still I feel as though it is my fault. ((this is depression central, you have to go somewhere uplifting or at least profound/meaningful with it))
> 
> I feel like there is an entire city within the ten-block radius around my house. if I wanted to, I could live my entire new Orleans life without leaving it: making convenience store dinners and drinking coffee at the café right around the corner from my house, procuring reading material from the neighborhood bookstore, eating at any of the about thirteen hundred million (real number) restaurants and bars within a five or ten minute walk. is this what it used to be liksg

#    
  


Mid-sentence, thirty-three minutes into his halting, stilted progress, Mako releases a frustrated yell that reverberates through the entire downstairs area. From the living room, Mum asks, “What the hell was that?”

Mako lowers his head and  _ thunk _ s it against his keyboard, producing an illegible keysmash right in the middle of his draft. It takes him a full minute to gather himself enough to backspace through it, one deliberate keystroke at a time.

Jem pokes his head into the office. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Mako says in an utterly unconvincing tone of voice. “I’m just over here about to throw my laptop or myself out the window – normal writing stuff.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, nothing! Aside from the fact that I’m irrelevant and I can’t write worth a damn and I don’t even know why I have this job, considering that going to an actual workplace five days of the week causes me physical pain and makes me reevaluate my entire choice to move out here, away from everything I ever cared about–”

“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon.” Jem approaches him, lowers steadying, loving hands to his shoulders. “Let’s step away from the computer and take a breather, yeah?”

“I can’t.” Mako taps out the end of his sentence. “I promised myself I’d finish the first draft tonight.”

“It’s due next week, Mako, come on.” Jem leans on his strength to swivel Mako’s chair around and get the man to face him. “Gently step away from the desk and let’s go lie down or something, okay? Look, I’ll make you some tea. You like chamomile, right? Or is it lemon? I can never remember.”

“What’s wrong with you?” About halfway through Jem’s homily, Mako’s expression became one of faint confusion; now, he looks up at his partner with narrowed eyes and a mouth hanging ajar. “Why are you being nice to me?”

“Because you look like your brain is about to start melting out of your eye sockets,” Jem replies. “I can’t be mean to you when mental and physical collapse is imminent.” He pauses, thoughtful. “Well, I  _ can _ , but…”

Mako makes a rough, helpless noise and puts his hands on his face. Pouting, amused and sympathetic, Jem laughs and rubs firmly into the junctures of Mako’s neck and shoulders.

“But then you do that and I  _ really _ can’t,” he finishes.

Mako sighs into his palms. “Can you touch my hair?” he whimpers.

Jem’s fingers push into his scalp. “Yes, Mako.”

“And like… kill me without actually killing me?”

“You’ll have to settle for tea and a joint catnap instead.”

Mako exhales harshly, melodramatically, then laughs uproariously because, as it’s been said, he’s crazy (not to mention some sort of deeply thankful that his crazy seems to be of a kind that Jem can handle). “I love how you will jump at literally any opportunity to get in bed with me.”

“Mmnh.” Jem tips Mako’s face up by his chin, kisses him on the lips, and puts on a smile when he visibly melts in reply. “Glad to know your love is real.” As he leaves the room, heading for the kitchen: “Don’t touch that damn keyboard or I’ll cut all your fingers off with your good knife!”

“Oh, yes, threaten me with painful mutilation, baby. You know how that gets me hot.”

That night, they go to bed at just after eleven. 

"Don't you want to move back to New Zealand?” Mako asks, apropos of nothing, into the darkness of the bedroom, staring off in the direction of the adjoining bathroom’s open door. “Buy a farm, raise some sheep. Live."

Behind him, Jem says, "Maybe.” Jem’s arms tighten around him. “Yeah. You liked that, didn't you?"

"I did."

There are lips on his earlobe, playful, honeyed whispers passing between them. "Farm boy."

"I did.” A moment passes before Mako begins to wriggle around onto his other side so that he’s facing Jem; he hooks his right leg around Jem’s left calf, rubs his ankle up against the grain of the hair growing there. “I felt like... everything I did was meaningful and concrete. I could hold it in my hands."

They are so close that they nearly speak into each other’s mouths. Jem frowns and says, "You don't feel like that anymore."

"I don't know, Jem. I don't know what I feel like.” Mako closes his eyes and lets their foreheads touch together. “I feel lost.”

Jem sighs. "Modernity, man."

Mako sighs back. "Late capitalism, bro."

Without warning, they are both laughing, clinging to each other in the center of the bed and wrapped around everything, everything that exists between them. For a moment, they are decades younger; for a moment, they are all that exists.

By their sophomore year of university, they were hanging out in Dr. Ngata’s office after class. Listening to the Beach Boys, dancing interpretively to “Kokomo” for Mum’s pleasure, bitching in semi-coded language about their most disliked professors. Mum would never say that she missed having Mako around the house – that was a type of emotional openness she’d never been built for – but when he sat in front of her desk with Jem, fiddling with her decorative abacus and whining about Dr. Kauffman, she exhibited a comfort of the type she only did at home when she came around to run fingers through his hair, when she said, “I’ll take care of him, baby,” and adopted the soul stance of a lioness ready to pounce. 

He always made her happy when he was making those long academic strides to greatness. A good little soldier, even if only because she wanted him to be.

After visiting with Mum for around an hour and a half, he and Jem would fly to their perch atop the staff parking garage. The first time they went up, they looked out upon the entire Kelburn campus and felt powerful, new, birdlike with their perfect vantage point; by the time of the Kauffman ordeal, however, they’d been out there so often that the view had simply become commonplace and comfortable. Still a little fun, of course, and still a little drugging, but on the whole soothingly, tediously boring.

On a cool, windy evening in late September 2006, they sat swinging their legs over the edge of the garage and passing a bottle of orange juice between themselves. The sky was the deep color of fresh blueberries and the stars were just beginning to peep their bright faces into being, twinkling down at Mako and Jem, saying, “Hello.”

“What do you want to do for your birthday?” Jem asked Mako as he passed off the Charlies. Mako sighed.

“I don’t know. I almost feel like I don’t want to do anything.”

“Why not?”

“Because, like…” Mako paused to sip orange juice. “It’s not like it was when I was a kid and the day was exciting and it meant something, you know, about my continued progress towards becoming an adult, or just  _ becoming _ . Now, it’s just like, oh. I’m going to be twenty. Big deal.”

“It  _ is _ a big deal.” Jem was always particularly talented at getting worked up over Mako’s general existence. “It’s like, dude – you made it! You survived another year of life on Earth! That’s big!”

“Especially for me.”

“What do you mean?”

Mako didn’t know what to call it – the feeling he’d been plagued with, to some degree, all his life, that had grown steadily in intensity since he’d moved to Wellington after the passing of Nana Victoria. At the time, he hadn’t the emotional vocabulary or the guts to identify it as suicidality and the tempered, nonsensical urge to self-destruct. All he’d known is that it had felt wrong – an internal throb that bled and festered and sometimes even screamed a little, the way it picked at his innards like some dark carrion bird. 

He shrugged. “Sometimes I’m just surprised that I’m still alive.” He gazed down at the small students milling about campus in the early evening, walking in groups of two or three out of the recreation centre and the music building. At one point, Jami came out of the latter with Deacon; the two didn’t see Mako and Jem, and in the abrupt darkness of the moment, neither Mako nor Jem made the effort to call out to them.

Jem took the orange juice from Mako’s hands. He idly shook the bottle around. He didn’t say, “I’m worried about you,” or “Are you okay?” because sometimes the question could, in fact, be asked too much; instead, he just said, “I’m glad you are.” 

Mako could have fallen right off of the parking garage. He never quite understood why his happiness coincided so closely with his kamikaze impulses.

Suddenly, out of the sky dropped a pale gobbet of bird shit that hit Mako directly on the left arm, staining his sweater. Mako and Jem stared at each other in abject horror before bursting into laughter; this apparently garnered the attention of Jami and Deacon, because then there was Jami’s voice calling up to them, “Ay! What are you two doin’ up there?!”

They came down. They all went to eat at the campus takeaway café, where Mako tried to clean his sweater in the bathroom while Jem grinned and laughed, laughed like he was the funniest thing in the whole wide world.

For Mako’s twentieth, the Wellington Teasippers congregated at the Southern Cross Garden Bar, procured an outside table, drank Tuatara Helluvas and munched on toasted flatbread topped with coconut yogurt, za’atar, and hummus. Tatum brought Ohad Spock along and Mako took much perverse pleasure in listening to his friends cook him to a crisp, poke fun at his Dumbo ears and wide-spaced eyes because it was easy and because none of them – save Loren, probably – cared much for his anal retentive, mathematical highness.

“How many pencils can you fit behind one of them bad boys?” Stephani asked, bold as anything, reaching out halfway across the table and flicking Ohad Spock’s protruding left ear. Mako nearly choked on his beer; Jem, always at his left side, made a noise kind of like he was dying.

“You sure you’ve been alright with all this wind, mate?” Deacon put in. “Haven’t gotten blown away or anything, eh?”

To Quick, Jami ducked her head a little and murmured, “Dude looks like the sloth from  _ Ice Age _ .”

Quick flapped his hands a bit. “Shh!” he exclaimed. “He can hear you!”

Tatum, who had retreated inside the pub to go to the bathroom, returned to the table asking, “What are you guys talking about?”

“Oh, we’re just making friends with your boy,” Stephani replied, flicking Ohad Spock’s ear a second time. Ohad Spock made a faintly irritated face, but said nothing as half the table devolved into impish laughter – Jami munching on flatbread, Rhys dusting her flying crumbs off of his shoulder, Loren passing Quick the remainder of her beer, Tatum giving her friends a look of quiet puzzlement.

While Phil Collins played through unseen speakers, Mako danced alone with a sort of girlish sluggishness, sipping amber from a highball, smoothly rolling his shoulders and rhythmically lifting his heels from the ground. He danced with Stephani, who led him like a man and pinched his ass so that he laughed; and Loren, who caught him when he stumbled and twirled him around until everything spun. On his fourth glass of lager, he dragged Jem up from the table and held the other in his arms, drunk, singing, “ _ You with the sad eyes _ ,” over and over and over again. Jem, similarly intoxicated, let himself be pulled in close and clung to, smiled all the way home while they walked down the Wellington streets, onto the Kelburn campus, into the Te Puni Village residential hall, and up to the apartment on the fifth floor. 

After saying goodnight to everyone at the door, Mako and Jem disappeared into the midnight darkness of their double room. Without thinking, pulling his pants and shoes off in one clumsy, half-staggering go, Mako crawled into Jem’s bed with him, squeezing in along his side, their bodies pressed together so that both of them could fit on the twin-size mattress, Mako tangling their legs when Jem began to grumble about the space.

“My bed is all the way across the room and I want to talk to you,” was Mako’s murmured excuse. He shrugged, smirking when the action teased a sharp laugh out of Jem thanks to the shoulder he was shoving right up into the other’s armpit. “And you’re warm, whatever.”

Jem’s hand brushed his thigh. He asked, “Did you have a good time tonight? Was it worth it to go out?”

“And get s-so drunk I could hardly walk home? Fuck yes.”

Jem laughed. Mako could feel the vibration of his body, every minute motion that caused their muscles and skin to gel together into thick, carnal human paste. 

“Can I tell you something?”

“I love it when you tell me something.”

Mako grinned. He turned and slid his chin over Jem’s shoulder; their faces this close together made everything refracted, a cross-eyed blur. Jem’s eyelashes were dark and long, as if mascara had been applied to them. His breath smelled like beer. Mako wanted to sleep in it.

“I kind of hate myself.” Mako nearly stopped talking right then and there, suddenly uncomfortable with the weight of his thoughts, but because he was tired and still quite intoxicated and because it was nice, actually, just talking to Jem so honestly like it was often hard to do when they were all so busy trying to be witty and clever, he picked speech right back up and said, “I just… feel like shit because I’m not, like, this conventionally polite, emotionally stable, good little boy, you know? I like… sleep all day and talk back to my professors, and I cry in public, and I lie to my mum–”

“The lying to your mum thing is complicated, though.”

“I know. I know.  _ Fuck _ , I’m so drunk.” Mako pushed his face into Jem’s neck and breathed into the skin, and there was Jem’s hand pressing into his stomach through his shirt, tamping down on his distress. “I feel crazy, Jem. I feel like I’m always spinning around and it doesn’t stop and like, I’m never going to be okay. I’m always going to be in a blender. A blender. I’m a mixed drink.”

Jem released a snorting, stuttering laugh. This made Mako laugh as well, made the bed shake, made Mako turn onto his left side and Jem, instinctively, wrap an arm around him and pull their bodies together, Jem the big spoon.

Minutes passed. The moon moved into the window across the room, filtering its light through the closed blinds. As Mako’s drunkenness took on a deeper, more languid quality, he became more aware of the warm, rhythmic puff of Jem’s breath against his nape, the slow circling of Jem’s fingers against his scalp, the intensifying penile hardness between his legs and against his lower back, his own hideous heart’s beating. He was feverish – stomach hot in its pit – turning around in Jem’s arms, tipping his face up towards the other’s, eyes dark. Mako had gotten a handjob in senior year from Neil Cesnik and worn a lot of eyeliner and lipstick as an actor. Sometimes, when he was feeling dangerously far away from himself, he kissed same-sex individuals in bar bathrooms and ran away before he could be asked for his number. He’d been with men before is the thing, but he couldn’t help but think just then that the real revelation was that he’d never wanted to be with any of them as much as he wanted to be with Jem, to kiss him, to rise his hand up between his thighs and squeeze.

“Can I?” he whispered, and pressed his groin into Jem’s.

“Yeah,” came Jem’s responding murmur just before their mouths were being pushed together by some unseen force, Mako’s tongue immediately snaking out to touch Jem’s, to taste his consent, the oh so sweet granting of permission.

It would have been a lie to have said that their romantic-sexual collision came out of nowhere. Jem had never expressed wholesale, entirely loving interest in anything or anybody like he’d expressed interest in Mako, and Mako’s assumed heterosexuality had been in question since before he’d even moved back to Wellington. After achieving détente in their junior year of high school, their relationship had taken on a sort of husband-and-wifely intimacy, a hip-and-hip closeness that everyone else had just assumed was the stuff of best friendship. It would have been the stuff of best friendship – if Jem had not so adored Mako from the moment they’d met. If Mako had not been so utterly beguiled by Jem’s sad eyes. If either of them had chosen to identify their feelings differently, to follow a different internal current of attraction and self-definition. If Mako had not crawled atop Jem the night of his twentieth birthday and ground his hips down, licking his way into Jem’s mouth, moaning a little.

Jem made a helpless noise, like he was being killed. “Mako–”

“Shhh.” Mako kissed him openmouthed. “Don’t talk, don’t–  _ oh _ .” 

There came bitter lager rising up within him, burning on the way up. Clapping his mouth shut, Mako groaned and began to roll off of Jem, to stumble out of bed. Before he could even reach the door, he caught the vomit in the scoop of his shirt and then, overwhelmed, started to cry. Jem, with a still-hard dick and a face redder than a beet, helped him clean up and put him in his own bed.

They didn’t talk about it the next morning or the morning after. They didn’t talk about it at all for the rest of the year, in fact. They went through the horror of finals together – secretly holding hands in the Rabbit, Jem waking Mako up for exams – and then, during an end-of-the-year summer that saw record highs in temperature, moved into a rat trap flat amidst the influx of Pacific heat, amidst tall oak trees that tapped their branches against the floor-to-ceiling windows; a house that leaned in the center and hosted many cockroaches as its surprise tenants; a house that was owned by a witchly pale Pākehā and her paper-white brother. 

Mako claimed the room in the house’s front right corner; Jem always, always, always on his left. They Christmas-shopped at the Old Bank Arcade for friends and family, nabbing handcrafted Belgian chocolate from de Spa, vibrant bath bombs from Lush, shea intensive hand balm from l’Occitane, a hundred-dollar dress for Tatum from Ricochet. They shared passionfruit gelato from Gelissimo and Jem put Mako’s fingers in his mouth when the sticky, melty confection dripped onto them. At home, Mako made a big bowl of poké that they ate while watching late-night television, lying on the floor in the living room, bodies barely touching beneath the  _ koru _ quilt. They stood together in the Ballroom Pool and Snooker Lounge and watched all the cool girls walk through, glassy-eyed and beautiful, while shotgunning Speight’s after Speight’s and playing slow, low-stakes games of billiards. When Jem won two out of three, Mako paid for their tab, letting out fake melodramatic sobs all the way to the bar. Walking out to the car, Mako vomited on the curbside without breaking his stride and Jem rubbed his back while he leaned against the Rabbit’s passenger side door. At home, they folded laundry and organized their old cassette tapes in shoe boxes. Mako listened to classical music in his room, shirtless, and Jem poked fun at this, saying, “That’s so gay.” He began to stretch his pierced earlobes, to lie with his head in Jem’s lap while Jem rubbed jojoba oil into the holes. He and Jem attended the university’s panels on natural theology, on environmentalism and the preservation of Māori cultural artifacts. Stephani and Quick came over to play Cluedo with them and drink cheap, twist-top champagne out of plastic mason jars. When Mako got stuck on the toilet without tissue, Jem ran straight home from class to give it to him. When Mako had his dark days – his screaming, aching, head-on-fire days – Jem put him to bed at six in the evening and told him not to worry about anything at all for the rest of the night, saying, “I’ll do your laundry, as much as it pains me.”

“You don’t like laundry?” Mako asked from his bed, swaddling himself up in all of his covers.

“It’s tedious!” Jem cried, standing and watching him from the doorway.

“That’s the point! That’s the appeal!”

“It never ends, though! Unless you walk around naked all the time, there’s always more dirty clothes to wash.”

“‘ _ It never ends _ ,’” Mako echoed, laughing. “Oh my God. By that same token, shouldn’t you also hate bathing and brushing your teeth? You have to do  _ that _ every day. You never get a break from  _ that _ .”

“Yeah, but hygiene makes you feel good.”

“So does laundry! Putting on clean clothes doesn’t make you feel good?”

“I mean, yeah, but there’s no instant gratification with laundry.” Jem was smiling, hugging himself as he doubled halfway over and yelled, “I’m an animal, Mako! I need to feel good now!”

“Oh, go away, you egg!” Mako pulled the covers over his head and laughed like he was a little boy, like he was in love. “Goodnight!”

He couldn’t have been in love. Being this way simply wasn’t possible. 

It wasn’t possible to be in love with a man who argued with him about the supposed “mealiness” and “tastiness” of honeydew while they washed the dishes at 2:29 in the morning, seven hours before an exam. It wasn’t possible to be in love with a man who didn’t excite him, provoke him, or make him feel anything but the way Tatum once made him feel – normal, at home, with his feet planted firmly on the ground. It wasn’t possible to be in love with a man, period – not when Mako could hardly read the words inscribed on the inside of his own skull and inner thighs. Jem could read; he saw nothing; and neither of them were gutsy enough to say or do anything for the longest because to do so would have been dangerous in the oughts; in the ultra-respectable, superboring landscape of Wellington; in this smallish locus of Western civilization; in their own heteronormalized minds. To get anywhere, they would have had to leave it all.

For their mid-year winter break in senior year, Mako took Jem back to Raukokore, where he pulled pictures of himself off of the walls and said, “Here you go. Just like you wanted.” Their first day there, they pulled a sailboat out of the garage and went to drift down the Raukokore River. Jem watched Mako raise the sails, maneuver the jib, pull on the halyards and fasten them to the cleats, and though he’d known Mako for five years at that point, watching the man at work in this way enthralled him as nature did ancient man. Mako’s every gesture became godlike in its novelty and the effect it produced; he was glorious to watch, glorious to know even in his deeply flawed, narcissistic, and self-loathing state. 

The verdant gradients of Raukokore’s hills and the way its horizon seemed to kiss the sky were the perfect anathema to the citified structure of Wellington. In Mako’s mind existed a faultless future in which he could stay there forever, living an unimaginable life of bliss and good eats and yes, sex, and yes, even love with Jeremiah Tui, who he’d once tasted and could not quite forget the flavor of. He saw himself being buried in this landscape, on the beach perhaps, in the sand, or on a grassy green hillside frequented by his favorite sheep. In the sailboat, Mako sat with Jem amid an electronic symphony of insect noises and the intensifying coolness of the late day, Jem winding arms around his belly in their frosty loneliness on the water, chin on his shoulder and hand in his side. Something inside Mako clicked audibly and without warning, his brain was a sort of projectionist’s screen on which shined everything he loved about the person he was with: the coathanger breadth of his shoulders and his oh so soft voice in public, so soft as to be almost impossible to perceive; his utter badness at being a good and social person at parties and his habit of following Mako around at them, deferring always to his judgment and his preferences; his endlessly charming tooth-gap, the way his top front teeth slanted slightly outwards and the low and warbling, almost musical lilt of his voice; the black as night hair growing thickly along both sides of his face and his wide, distinctively Māori smile.

Everything abruptly felt too quiet, the easy camaraderie and infantile joking that took place during the eight-hour car ride up to the Bay of Plenty having shifted, as if they’d stretched plausible deniability to its limits and were bumping up against the invisible boundary of things just friends did. Took trips together. Held each other to the musical rocking of a grandmother’s sailboat. Stared at each other at dinner and thought about how nice it was to have met this person, this person who knew everything about you. Stared at each other’s hands; Mako’s hands around the sailboat’s lines, taking the vessel to shore.

He showed Jem his grandmother’s bed.

“It’s a California king,” he said. “I swear I’ve never seen anything bigger. I used to imagine all of my family members inside it. Not just the Ngatas – not just the dead ones either, like, my great-uncle and my great-aunt and my grandmother, their corpses – but like, my dad and Robbie and Miss Shanna, too, even though Shanna’s not really related to me. And then like, Mum grew up with this kid who was my principal when I went to school here – Paxton – I used to imagine him in here, too. All of us in here, together. A family bed. A mass grave.”

“That’s dark,” Jem remarked.

“And Jewish.” Mako made a wry face. He took his pants off and got in the bed and said, “I’m tired.”

Jem looked at him strangely in the low lamplight. Mako, again, couldn’t see his eyes behind the glare cast on the lenses of his glasses. Eventually, after a moment that stretched on for five years, Jem shucked off his own jeans and crawled in beside Mako, shivering at the coolness of blankets that had not been touched for half a decade. There was something slightly creepy about lying in the space of Mako’s dead grandmother, but Mako didn’t fear – his family had always been one of ghosts. 

Like he had in the boat and two years before in the twin-size dormitory bed, Jem reached for Mako and the weirdness of it felt lovely, too warm, like there wasn’t enough space in Mako’s chest for all the air that wanted to be there. They didn’t talk for a while; Mako just laid entirely still and felt Jem’s arms and legs wrapped around him, Jem’s hands inside his clothes, Jem’s breath as it hit him and then retreated. When Mako thought he would sleep, Jem said his name.

“Mako?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you.”

Mako wanted to cry like he did when he vomited in his shirt. Instead, he surged in and kissed Jem on the mouth, then at the mouth’s corner, then pulled Jem’s glasses off to kiss all over and around the perfect squinty eyes – Jem clinging to him and making that same noise from years ago, that noise that said he was being killed. For a moment that lasted over sixteen years, Mako Gehringer was the most important person in the world to somebody. In the morning, he scrambled eggs soft and he and Jem didn’t talk about it – not when they shared the bed again the following night, not when they drove back to Wellington and went back to the way things were before.

On the night of Monday, April 20 th , 2025, Mako and Jem brush their teeth side-by-side over the bathroom sink in the Bywater, wearing their underwear and T-shirts for bed, listening to Dido play in the next room. With a mouthful of toothpaste, Jem looks at Mako in the mirror and asks, “What if we did it tomorrow?”

Mako spits a pinkish fusion of toothpaste and saliva into the sink bowl and grimaces. “Did what?”

“Got married.” Jem brushes his front teeth a little. “Tomorrow.”

“What, like went down to city hall?”

“Yeah.” Now Jem reaches his brush all the way into the rear of his mouth, towards his molars; Mako takes the opportunity to continue brushing himself and mull the question over, scraping food gunk off of his teeth all the while. When Jem extracts his toothbrush and starts to run cool water from the faucet: “Kory can be a witness. We don’t have to dress up. We’ll just do it. Get it over with.”

Mako rinses his toothbrush and then lets water pool in his cupped palms. “We both have work tomorrow.”

“Alright, then, this weekend.” Together they swish and gargle; Mako bumps Jem with his hip and water nearly spills out of his upturned, open mouth. Jem whacks him on the arm and then spits into the sink. “How do you feel about that?”

Once his mouth has been rinsed out and emptied, Mako shakes his head. “No.”

“No?”

“No.” Mako sticks his toothbrush in their little plastic cup and ninjas Jem into a kiss, slinging his arms around the man’s hips and dragging him into the bedroom. “I’ll tell you how we’re going to get married.”

It will be a wedding in the New Orleans spring, four years from now; a parade through City Park in the late pink lemonade afternoon. After spending thirty-eight years of life with perfect hearing, Jem will, within the next year, go spontaneously deaf. They will spend months upon months of money and time trying to treat this mysterious illness, learn American Sign Language, and, eventually, send Kory off to college in New York. She will come back short-haired and arm-in-arm with a girl her age to attend the April shindig, along with the Wellington Teasippers, who will fly en masse to draw naked renditions of Mako and Jem in the guest book and toast and roast their founders over barbecue chicken and under fairy lights. 

“Apologies, lads, for any crying that may take place in the next five minutes,” Tatum, the maid of honor, will say, standing up in front of all of their friends and no, not Mum, who is nowhere to be seen – not even in death. Tatum will grin. “That should cover me, right?

“So… Mako and I met each other when we were sixteen years old, in Blaise Peltier's theatre class. This August will make the twenty-fourth year we’ve known each other, can you believe that?” The congregated guests will whoop in celebration. “I know, right? And, uh… when I was in the eleventh grade, I realized that I was in love with Mako, and that I had been in love with him probably since the moment he’d walked into that theatre class looking like a Māori Michael Jackson.” The guests will laugh. “He did! You guys remember him, with the hair, and that… that fucking red leather jacket he used to wear. He could pull it off, though, he was cute. What am I saying, he’s still cute, look at him!” Extending an arm in his direction: “I could just eat him up. Me with my gay ass, you know I would, right? If you ever need a, you know…” She will grin and wink. “Gimme a call, baby. Alright?

“Anyway! I know that being in love when you're sixteen is a lot different from being in love when you're an adult, but I can truthfully look back on my feelings at that time and definitively say that I was in stupid, overdramatic, quarter-life-memoir, I-might-legitimately-die-if-I-can’t-touch-you-always love with him. Being the emotionally mature and sensible young lady I was, I kept this information to myself… for a whopping two months.” The crowd will snicker. “Until hungover and vomiting alongside him into my mum’s bathtub, I told him with tears streaming down my sorry teenage face that I was in love with him. This is not how I planned to tell him, but what can you do?

“Now, many of the people here know what kind of person Mako can be – they know his stormy side, they know what it's like to feel miles away from him while you're in the same room, they know how beautifully and wonderfully hard-headed he can be. And I’m not saying this to embarrass him, I’m saying it because in light of that, I know I told Mako how I felt about him because I wanted to change him into a person who was endlessly available and never kept secrets from me and who would stand with me at his own expense. That's probably the worst reason to ever tell someone you love them, and that kind of love is one of the worst kinds of love there is. I’m not going to talk about what came of that fateful confession because I don’t think it's relevant given our friendship now – and also because the story is probably gonna go down in the Wellington Teasippers’ Book of Life and History and Drama for the rest of all time, because we may be good at many things, my friends, but not gossiping about old drama is not one of them. I  _ will _ say, though, that what did happen was that I realized that I never knew Mako before then, not really, and in the twenty-four years since, I’ve gotten to see him. Really fucking  _ see _ him.

“I’ve seen a man who finds it hard to get out of bed in the morning – not because of cowardice and not because of exhaustion – but because he feels and perceives the world so deeply and so intensely that it's too much to face most days. I see a man who is so strong and so resilient that he gets up anyway. I see a man whose sense of humor splits my goddamn sides, who is not gloomy but is darkly sarcastic and so fucking funny he needs his own comedy routine (and he has one! he’s had many of them!). I see a man who cherishes life and cherishes the people in his life so much and so deeply that there's no room for regret or exhaustion or unnecessary hatred or bitterness, who holds his friends, his family, and especially his daughter in his heart the way everyone just dreams to be held.” Here, Tatum will begin to cry.

“I wasn't going to cry,” she will say. “I know I apologized, but I just knew I wasn’t going to cry.” She will turn to Mako, flicking moisture out of her eyes.

“And Mako, you know I used to be so afraid of life turning out in ways we never planned or expected it to, especially with how fucked up we both are mentally – I used to think we weren't going to make it.” She will grin. “But you made it. You fucking aced it, bro, and I'm so proud of you.”

And Mako will weep for all the world to see. He won’t be embarrassed about it, either.

He’ll dance with his deaf husband. Hold Jem’s fucking heart in his hands and sign, “What if I had never met you?” He’ll talk about the end of their senior year at Victoria U – when they had all the Teasippers at the leaning Hargreaves flat the week Quick left his metronome in his backpack in the music building and the bomb squad was called and classes were nearly cancelled for a week, and Mako sat on the front steps crying because his whole life was about to change, crying until his chest hurt, crying when one by one every one of his best fucking friends came out and held him and talked with him for at least thirty minutes at a time, crying when Jem kissed his head in the secret light of a late December night and promised to get him hot fries and blue Powerade from the corner store if he only rode shotgun, and then they got in the Rabbit and listened to “Dancing In the Dark” and sang along with Springsteen at the top of their lungs, and the next week Mako got a shark tattooed on his arm and Jem got a tui bird in the same exact place, and then graduation came and Mako was magna cum laude and Mum was so proud of him, so proud she couldn’t even speak the words into reality – and Jem, unhearing but listening intently to every word, will hold him so close and love him so much that he will move with him back to New Zealand, to a small town near the Kapiti Coast, where they will tend to a flock of sheep and live that unimaginable life he once thought of, together, unexcited, maybe not always happy, but happy enough.

“And that’s how we’ll get married.” Behind Mako, Jem’s breathing has taken on a slow, gradual rhythm indicative of slumber, arms heavy around his waist. Mako, pleased at having literally talked Jem unconscious, reaches over to the nightstand and switches off the light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> have a [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1enllbfh4bvFw8RaHTrm4g?si=FNN1CcUPTdCdKsOUvpLa0w) for wellington in the oughts.


	19. 19

#  _ 19 _

Feeling out of place, Mako rearranges the books in his office. He hasn’t appreciated Mum’s alphabetizing, as much sense as it has made over the past few months; it simply hasn’t spoken to the fictional mental tableau that exists in his mind, that arranges his books based on their sentimental value to him rather than some definite, librarian attribute such as name or author. Cross-legged on the floor, pushing  _ Infinite Jest _ in place next to his father’s severely outdated series of  _ World Book _ s that he’s only kept in the intervening years between 2002 and now due to his childish, affectionate attachment to the photographs found within them, he is glancing at his phone laid on the hardwood beside him, showing him the time – 12:19 AM – when suddenly, an iMessage notification flashes across the screen.

#    
  


**Today** 12:19 AM

**aroha ihimaera  
** Baby doll! My love, my life, my everything! Are you available for a Skype?

#    
  


Mako watches his phone until the screen goes black. He picks himself up off the floor, pocketing his phone on the way up, and pads over to his desk made of dark walnut wood, where his MacBook sits open, sleeping. He waits for the computer to wake up. Waits for Skype to load. Waits for his stomach to stop feeling like a salted slug pretzel – even now, thirteen years into his post-Aroha life – and then gives the woman of his not-dreams a call. When her exquisite brown face appears on his monitor – sometimes skidding pixelated across the screen when it moves, all the subtleties of her expression partially lost to middling internet and just as middling video resolution – it is smiling brightly enough to dazzle and surrounded by a dark mocha lion’s mane.

“Mako, my resplendent darling man! My most wonderful mean-as shark baby!” As she speaks, Aroha’s head bounces all over the place, an Instagrammable beauty in the Instagrammable tableau of what Mako recognizes as Ilse’s backyard patio, the potted ferns and the pinstriped lawnchairs, the picture window gazing inside the house.

Mako suppresses a yawn. “Hello.”

“‘ _ Hello _ ’?” Aroha’s face pinches in the center, incredulous. “That’s all I get – a wimpy little ‘ _ hello _ ’?”

“ _ Hello _ , goddess of reptiles, queen from the planet Jupiter with perfect skin and the juiciest of kisses.”

Aroha peels her lips back from her lovely teeth in a pretty, almost girlish grin. “Why Jupiter?”

Mako shrugs. “It sounded nicer than Venus.”

“Oh, no, I like Venus. Venus has such sexy, feminine energy. Jupiter is so masculine, so patriarchal.” Abruptly, Aroha’s expression changes to something soft, oh so Venusian in its sexy femininity. “How are you, my love?” she asks.

“Hot,” is Mako’s reply, delivered deadpan. Despite the efforts of the pitiful electric fan he picked up from Wal-Mart this morning (which, by the way, is a place he is in no rush to visit ever again), there is a thin sheen of sweat laying uncomfortably upon his forehead, emerging through the skin beneath his tangerine T-shirt, in all of his crevices.

Aroha trills her tongue against the roof of her mouth, purring. “Kinky.”

“Don’t,” Mako says, then, after a beat of thought: “Why are you exactly like me?”

Instead of answering, Aroha simply smirks and says, “I want to tell you about what happened last week.” Her hands, fingers interlocked, curl thoughtfully beneath her chin. “Can I tell you? Pretty please, pretty please? With sugar on top?”

Mako has learned in the years he has known her that Aroha is a woman in possession of scores of semantic intelligence paired with a nearly negative degree of common sense. Upon her mystical island thousands of miles away, she is attended by her closest companions: the sun, the Earth, and the wedding planner Ilse, without whose wisdom and restraint she would likely destroy her own life. On this faintly sweltering day in the beginning of May, she is still one of, if not the singular, objects of Mako’s somewhat tortured affection – a Pink Lady, saccharine, Evil Queen poisoned apple of his eye – and Mako wants to go to bed, to yawn and yawn and whisper dumb things to Jem and float his sad little way to sleep, to sink into the dirt below the house as he does almost every night, but instead of giving into the urge, he stares into his webcam and says, “You’re so annoying.”

Aroha makes her bottom lip fat and sulky. “You love me, though,” she whines, fluffing her full, lush hair up and out with her hands, playing him like a guitar. “You  _ love _ me, Mako, let’s not even kid around–”

“Oh my God, just tell me.” Mako drags his hands down over his face, digging his fingernails into his bearded jaws with a sigh. “Don’t do this to me, just– talk, tell me what you wanted to tell me.”

Victorious, Aroha lets her pretense of misery slip back into her default state: pure, beautiful, batshit mania. Eyes blown out saucer-wide with enthusiasm, face a brilliant, blinding Māori sun, she dives into her story with a fervor.

“Okay. So last week – I guess I should preface this with the fact that I’m about ninety-seven percent sure that everything is pretty much normal now, so you don’t get stuck wondering at this story’s various beats and whatnot about whether or not my life has fundamentally changed. I might be pregnant? But it’s no big–”

“You  _ might _ be  _ pregnant? _ ”

Aroha, surprising no one, swats the air in a universal expression of dismissal. “Haven’t started my period yet. I’ll keep you posted.”

“Shit, Aroha, I don’t care,” Mako says, then immediately contradicts himself and adds, “I think the fact that you  _ might be pregnant _ is, yes,  _ big _ , considering, y’know.”

“What, the fact that I’m a crazy bitch who kills everything she touches?”

Mako blinks, suddenly seconds from stroking out out of sheer, simple anger. “Thanks for putting the absolute worst spin on that.”

“Can I tell my story? Can I?” Aroha’s mania has put its toetips into slightly pissed off territory – this, Mako has gleaned from the sharpest edge in her words, from her voice’s upward climb in pitch.

Uninterested in fighting – not at this hour, not while he feels so fragile – Mako replies, “Let me put my head down.” Then, after he has done so – forehead  _ plunk _ ing down against the inside of his left arm, into the dark and safe inner curve of his elbow – “Go ahead.”

“Thank you. So, a fortnight ago, Ilse took me to her father’s retirement dinner. Have I ever told you what Ilse’s father does? Has Ilse? I feel like she doesn’t talk about her dad too much, it’s always her mum, her mum, her mum. They’re very close. I envy them that. Anyway, her daddy – he was the head of this huge,  _ huge _ PR firm in Auckland, so Ilse, she came into my room about three weeks ago, still on the phone with the old man, and she said, ‘Daddy’s retiring, so we’re going to Auckland in a week. Pack a nice dress.’ Whatever, I’m game. A week later, we show up. I’ve got this perfect Balenciaga dress on, it has this beautiful floral pattern and a mock-neck, a skater skirt, cut-out in the back, it’s so sexy. Ilse, of course, she’s killing it in white, she looks like she’s going to her boho chic wedding on the water. I hope the day I get fat like her, I end up looking as beautiful as she does. I probably won’t. I need to stop drinking –  _ ha! _ But oh God, Mako, this party.  _ Old _ people,  _ old _ people for  _ days _ , all of them in white. I feel like, in retrospect, with Ilse wearing white and the fucking geriatric procession in much the same, I must have missed the memo, there may have been a theme, I don’t know. Ilse’s mum. Boy, oh boy, her  _ mum _ . You know her parents have been divorced for years, right? That’s important. We’ll put a pin in that. Ilse’s mum is there, and I swear, when I saw the woman I almost peed myself. You know how small dogs urinate when they get excited or surprised? That was me, looking at her. She was  _ gorgeous _ . Ilse has this classic, old Hollywood sort of look about her, you know, but she’s fat, so it gets kind of lost in translation. Not so for her mother. She was like, Joan Crawford in the flesh, like the female equivalent of men who age like fine wine. I told her that, I think – I don’t remember most of what came out of my mouth that night, Ilse and I drank a whole bottle of gin with tonic before we showed up. Anyway. So, I’m hanging on mummy’s arm, right? Practically  _ all night long _ . It’s almost like she’s wearing me, like I’m her shawl, it’s cute. Kind of embarrassing, but it’s cute. Eventually the party started winding down, so Ilse and I – we were checked in at the Amora – but mummy asks us, she tells us we can stay with her for the night, she has this beautiful house near Judges Bay. So we all hop in a cab and go home with her. Mako.  _ Mako _ . When I tell you that I spent the night in bed with Ilse’s sexy-as, classy-as mum – when I tell you that I did things with that woman that may very well be illegal in your American states – I’m not exaggerating–”

“Wait.” Finally, Mako lifts his head to stare blearily, inquisitively into his webcam, the dark cloud of his hair mussed up into a comically lopsided, curlicue question mark on the top of his head. “You did this. With Ilse. In the next room?”

“No, not the next room,” Aroha replies, matter of fact. Mako watches her blandly examine her cuticles as she says, remorseless in the manner fundamentally gotten at by insanity pleas and the poetry of the cheated on and heartbroken, “The guest room was all the way down the hall, past the bathroom and the study. Mummy does  _ very  _ well for herself.”

Mako contorts his face in what he hopes is the expression that most clearly conveys his utter disgust at having to know a person like Aroha, at having been in love with her, at being somewhat in love with her still. Against his will – the words falling out of his mouth of their own twisted volition – he says, “I don’t see how your hypothetical pregnancy, um.  _ Emerges _ from this series of events.” Feeling awful for it, he adds, “Unless both Ilse’s mum and dad are like, transgender or whatever, which is frankly more than I ever need to know about people I’ve never met and never will meet, and I’m not even going to go into everything you just told me–”

“ _ For your information _ , that wasn’t the end of the story.”

“Is there an end? Is it in sight?”

“Let me talk!” Flicking her hair roughly out of her face, Aroha puts on her sternest, meanest face, stretching her eyes and parting her lips with momentary outrage. “Can I talk? Can you not be an asshole long enough for me to finish? Can you do that?”

Mako resolves not to feel bad about his impatience, his general exhaustion. He steels himself in this resolve, in this perfect rightness of his, this utter blamelessness. He breathes. Blinks slow and deliberate. Rests his jaws in his hands. Says, “Okay,” swallowing down and snowballing so much guilt in his gut it’s nearly unbearable.

Aroha continues.

“After that night, I was convinced I wouldn’t see Ilse’s mum ever again. It would just be one of those perfectly enchanting nights I would hold in my memory and go back to on cold and lonely nights.  _ But _ , I was wrong. A week later – this would be  _ last _ week if we’re talking about right now – Ilse’s parents show up in Wellington for a surprise visit. Now I’m sure you’re thinking, why would both of her parents come together? Didn’t you say a little while ago they were divorced? I was thinking the same thing at the time! So I asked them over lunch – which they treated Ilse and I to – I asked them what the deal was, if they were one of those couples that stayed close enough after their separation to take trips together and things like that.  _ Bro _ . Daddy straight up told me he divorced mummy in order to marry a younger woman who’d been harassing him for  _ years _ to make their relationship official, but he and mummy stayed together! The whole time! I asked him if the younger woman knew he was still seeing his ex. Daddy said, ‘Hell no,’ and laughed! And I’m thinking to myself… this is  _ awesome _ . Like, how wonderful that two adults can be so completely real about their desires, that they can be simpatico without being, I don’t know, attached by the hip and constrained by the law and bullshit societal expectations. Looking at the two of them, at mummy and daddy – they reminded me of us, you know. Of when we were happy, of what I wanted us to become.”

Mako squints into his webcam. “Divorced and adulterous?”

“ _ No _ , you’ve missed the point entirely.” Aroha’s half-pixelated face is a mask of sadness, of unalloyed pity for his poor, unfortunate squareness, his tragic imprisonment to an established romantic ethic. “I wanted us to be…  _ free _ . Old and vulgar and doing whatever the hell we wanted, because it made us happy, because fuck everyone else.”

Mako can remember a time when he would have agreed with and shared this dream of hers wholeheartedly. Now, he just hedges.

“What happened after that?” he asks.

“Well, Ilse had to meet with a client, but I wanted to keep hanging out with her parents, so the three of us spent the day together,” Aroha says. “After lunch, we went to the Old Bank Arcade and got deluxe massages and facials. Mummy paid for  _ everything _ . We went down to the quay and watched the fat cats in their fancy boats sail down the harbor. I took them down to Ivy and we had the literal  _ gayest _ time. Then mummy and daddy took me back to their hotel room.”

“Oh, God.”

“ _ Oh God _ indeed.” Aroha’s grin is distinctly Cheshire in nature. “We fucked in every way it is physically possible for three people to fuck. We fucked so much I swear to God at one point we were astrally projecting, and our astral projections were also fucking, like on the ceiling above where our physical forms were themselves fucking. Daddy fucked me. Mummy fucked me. Daddy fucked mummy. I fucked mummy–”

“I feel like what little innocence I have left is now gone, just, fucking obliterated.” Mako rubs his index and middle fingers in tight little circles against his temples, stretching the skin of his eyelids until he’s gone straight past Polynesian all the way to full East Asian. “Where’s my brain bleach? I know it’s somewhere around here–”

“Oh, don’t be so provincial,” Aroha snaps. “I’m talking about sex.”

“Sex with your friend-slash-roommate-slash-surrogate mother’s parents!  _ Both  _ of them! In tandem!”

“ _ That’s _ the sexy part! I don’t recall you ever being so squeamish about threesomes when  _ we _ were together.”

“It’s not the threesome. Oh my God. It’s so not about the threesome.” Mako grips both sides of his head just in case they make the spontaneous decision to fly outwards in opposite directions. “It’s the having sex with your good friend’s parents. It’s the fact that you’re telling me about this in Ilse’s backyard in  _ the middle of the afternoon _ and she probably has no clue that it happened. She doesn’t know, does she? Did you tell her?”

Aroha’s expression takes on a wondering, bewildered quality. “Why would I tell her?”

Mako barely resists the urge to slam his head down against his desktop. He decides once and for all that he’s talking to an alien.

“Anyway.” Unfazed and, truth be told, entirely level-headed, Aroha chugs right along with her tale. “Ever since my little Thursday of bliss, I’ve felt  _ off _ . Part of me thinks it’s the malaise of having encountered my true soulmate and let them slip by, but I don’t think my vaginal discharge would be this heavy if that was the case–”

“ _ Yum _ ,” Mako quips.

“Plus, I don’t know. I don’t feel like I did when I first got pregnant with Kora, but I don’t  _ not _ feel like I did then, either.”

“I love how it took just about ten minutes of conversation for you to finally get around to even thinking about Kory,” Mako remarks, voice all sharp disguised as syrupy-molasses-sweet.

“Oh!” Abruptly, Aroha’s face floods with the sort of bright, belated recognition that Mako has come to expect in response to any direct reminder of her child’s continued existence out in a real, chaotically spinning world and not just in some oft-forgotten drawer in the back of her mind. Aroha leans further into her computer, appears as a result slightly larger within the white-silver frame of Mako’s monitor; she asks, “Where is she? I want to talk to her.”

“It’s twelve-thirty at night here, Aroha.” Mako feels almost sad delivering such news, almost sympathetic beneath the geologic layers of brain-breaking disappointment and sheer spite laid over whatever merciful feelings he has left in his heart for his dear, darling ex. He fakes a compassionate smile for the camera’s sake. “Kory was in bed two and a half hours ago.”

“Dammit,” Aroha hisses, shaking her head just a little, and Mako wonders truly if her displeasure is genuine and not just for show, if she’s not pulling sad faces for good parent karma points. She tucks a bit of loose hair behind her left ear, which does virtually nothing to tame the general wildness of her tresses. “I want to come see her soon,” she says, surprising the shit out of Mako. 

Mako rakes his fingernails down along his left jaw and revels in the intensely satisfying  _ scritch-scratch _ noise of keratin against facial hair. “Yeah?”

“I have this week and the next off from work. I can fly in on Saturday, which, I guess, would be Friday where you are – or would it be Sunday? I don’t know…”

“Wait, you’re serious?” Mako, abruptly awake and alert as if someone has pinched him hard, sits up and narrows his eyes into his webcam. “You’re going to drop everything and just… show up?”

“Well, I wouldn’t be dropping everything,” Aroha says with an incredible, infuriating casualness. She’s still playing with her hair and it makes Mako want to yell, how much he loves it. “I’d be taking advantage of time I’ve been allotted for myself to come and have fun in New Orleans.”

“And see your daughter.”

“Well,  _ duh _ .” Aroha’s mouth curls cutely, almost felinely at the corner. “We can go shopping, like mothers and daughters should.”

Mako experiences a strange hollowness of the chest, an oh so darling shortness of breath. He thinks of his bald mother, a week out of her hip replacement surgery. He says, reaching for anything, “My mum is sick, you know. Like, really sick.”

Appallingly, Aroha replies, “So? All I need is my little teddy bear and your living room couch.” Which is how Mako ends up with a mere week to plan for a visit from the ex-love of his life.

He weasels out of the Skype call with a kraken of a yawn and a mostly honest profession to the nearly skull-melting enervation that has naturally come out of coping with everything, his mother’s illness included. Signing off, Aroha kisses her fingertips and presses them into her webcam, and Mako could let himself fall to pieces at that – his bones popping out of their sockets like in a cartoon, complete with silly xylophone noises – but instead, he just says, “Goodbye, Aroha,” closes his laptop, retrieves a glass of water from the kitchen, and goes upstairs to bed, leaving books on the floor of his office and his heart in some downstairs, far-but-not-too-faraway place in the house.

Two days before Mother’s Day, Mako takes Mum to her oncologist to talk about options. In the wake of the unsuccessful round of chemotherapy and the metastasis of her cancer to the bones, the doctor proposes the Genghis Khan of cancer treatment: double mastectomy followed up by total body irradiation and a bone marrow transplant. This, Dr. Arulpragasam says, will result in the destruction of Mum’s immune system and could very possibly lead to her death via opportunistic infection. 

“No,” Mako says. He shakes his head, the finality of his answer pronounced. “No.”

From her wheelchair at his side, Mum furrows her brow at her son and retorts, “You can’t make that decision.”

Mako’s jaw hits the floor, bounces a little. “You’re not actually considering this.”

“What have I got to lose?” Mum asks, and for once in her life, she is as calm as the Pacific sea – not Aries angry, not fighting anything but her own kin. “This is my one shot, isn’t it?” She looks at Dr. Arulpragasam, who adopts an expression of reluctant acknowledgement. “I’m going to take it.”

“No, no – we’re going to talk about this first–”

“What’s there to talk about, Mako?”

“Uh, the fact that you could kill yourself in a month or live for a whole other year!”

“Live like what? Like  _ this? _ ” Mum, in her heart-stopping, Mauian way, throws her head back and releases her lovely booming laugh into the cool, conditioned air of Dr. Arulpragasam’s office. She gazes at Mako with her tired eyes, the crow’s feet spidering out at the corners, and says, “I’m dying, honey. I’m in pain.”

“We’re all in pain!”

“Don’t you dare do that to me, you shit. I can fix this now or go out trying.” Mum turns back to the doctor. “I’ll do it.” Looking at Mako: “You’re just gonna have to lie down and take this one, baby.”

Mako flat out refuses. He resolves to be mad at Mum until the last day of her life, be it years or months from now, and seethes while she and Dr. Arulpragasam schedule her mastectomy for the end of June.

For the rest of the week, he throws himself into preparing for Aroha. He washes sheets and blankets and gets the deets on her current dietary specifications – apparently, for the time being, she is a vegetarian for the third or fourth time in her life. He starts to go grocery shopping, then tells himself they can do it together after she actually touches down on the North American continent. He asks Jem to fuck him hard every night until she comes, saying, “I don’t want to think. If I think, my heart is going to explode.”

“Don’t you mean your head?” Jem asks, pushing his hair off of his forehead.

“Same fucking difference,” Mako replies, then wraps his whole body around Jem’s and pulls the man down into the bed with him, already open wide.

He is brought back to February 2009, when he argued with Aroha in a bar after she’d blatantly flirted with the woman buying drinks for all the cute ladies in the establishment. They never could fight worth a damn when they first started dating, but they sure as hell tried – Mako storming off in a huff and going back to the Hargreaves flat, furious over Aroha’s casual indifference toward his feelings, her “So what? and “Big deal.” He went to sleep that night after a big glass of wine and a syndicated Bond film, feeling that he was going to stay mad about this forever. Of course, two hours later, he woke to Aroha climbing into his bed, smelling like the bar and an apology and getting between him and the covers to kiss his sleepy mouth.

“I’m sorry, baby,” she whispered into his chin, warm all over, her pants off and her body pliant against his. “I always do this, I’m such a fuck-up. I’m sorry. I love you. Please forgive me.”

They’d only been seeing each other for about three months at the time. Aroha said, “I love you,” incredibly frequently and Mako thought it meant that she was like him – a fast faller, a big-hearted mess. She wasn’t a fuck-up, and the whole situation was incredibly stupid, but he ate her sorry up like it was sweet pudding and kissed all the way down her neck, into the crevice between her collarbones.

In March, Mako immortalized her in ink on his left thigh as a bare-breasted mermaid and Aroha did him the same on the place below her right breast. They promised not to flirt with strangers in each other’s presence – a basic courtesy for Mako, who was deeply jealous and insecure by nature; a seemingly herculean task for Aroha, who liked to spread herself thin like jelly over everything and everyone she pleased. They moved into a single-bedroom flat in Newtown that was a block from the hospital and a five minute drive from everything worth being five minutes away from in Wellington, and despite the apprehensions of everyone who really mattered in Mako’s life – Mum, more than anything, and Jem, despite the fact that he wouldn’t really say anything in the way of actual criticism of Mako’s choice – Mako didn’t want to wait through a year of dating to have Aroha in a house that they shared, available always to kiss, eating hummus and pita chips on the sofa, kicking in her sleep through all her running-in-Oamaru dreams.

On Tuesday nights, they walked back to the house from dance halls – five thousand footsteps in a spaghetti strap red dress and a bright Hawaiian shirt, arm-in-arm under yellow streetlights and in the advancing cool of the fall. Like kids, they let the dishes and the dirt pile up in the house until Sunday came and bitchiness began to trickle into all of their interactions, after which they made a beeline for the kitchen and kissed, pinching each other’s ass cheeks, while washing and rinsing damn near every plate, cup, bowl, and utensil they owned. When Aroha wanted it, Mako ran out to pick up Indian takeaway and bottles of Rosé in the middle of the night. They ate and drank in bed until the morning came, then skipped off to work after two quarts of coffee and a quick flurry of  _ I love you _ s. She talked shit about her friends. Called Marjory a stick in the mud and Olivia a closeminded, condescending bitch with a shit haircut. Mako played the piano bought for him as a housewarming present by all of the Wellington Teasippers and smoked cannabis while Aroha danced barefoot and half-naked around the living room, her eventually coming over to play with his hair, to bite the shell of his ear, to whisper, “Do you want to take a shower?” And he did. He crowded her up against the tile wall, got on his knees, and lapped doglike at her clitoris until she screamed. The next day he bought her an end table shaped like an orange octopus and laughed as she jumped all around him in her excitement, shrieking like a little girl, kissing him all over his face. Aroha took off for Australia in pursuit of the tiliqua rugose without telling him. For an unbearable twenty-two hours, Mako found himself furious and frenzied – not knowing where she was, not being able to reach her via telephone or email, not even a factor in her decision to fuck off to who knows where for who knows how long. Finally, she called him from a phone booth in Paraburdoo explaining her absence as the result of a surprise research expedition she quote, “had, had, had” to embark on. When she got home, they fought for four days and made up over the course of three explosive, wet-faced orgasms that left them hungover for a week, sluggishly dragging their bodies over each other and the Earth like jelly. Forgiveness was religious for them in this way. 

Always, they talked about breaking their lease and moving into a new flat – one with more natural light or a bigger bathroom or additional closet space. Always, they pushed each other around while sleeping, sometimes falling out of bed, sometimes accidentally crushing the air from each other’s lungs. Always, their relationship pushed up against its own boundary lines, trying to break out of its defined space, never able to simply sit down and breathe. Maybe they got off on each other’s emotional intensity and unintelligibility. Maybe they were never meant to do anything but exactly what they did – feel feelings at each other at full, cyclonic force. 

When six months in, Mako began to think of Aroha as someone he could marry, the feeling of this flew in the face of everything he knew was objectively bad about her. The way that being with her was essentially like dating and living with a particularly tall thirteen year old who’d never been told the word “no.” Her two-facedness with her friends, how she’d lavish supernatural levels of affection on them in their presence and then, after they’d gone home, say the nastiest things she could conjure up and call them all “toxic” and “not worth [her] time.” Her way of regularly sending his heart rate sailing through the roof, which was as romantic as it was purely stressful and which had the effect of making him feel about sixty times crazier than he had before he’d met her – him up all night long just to please her in bed, dying to make her laugh as she’d never laughed before, skipping dates with friends to be with her, drinking like a fish and smoking like a fire. Somehow, despite all this, he wanted to hold her hand, roll around naked with her, and have thirty of her babies. He loved her in his marrow; he couldn’t ask for her perfection. 

He told her this in July.

Sitting on the toilet seat, watching her brush her teeth and admiring her in all her evening beauty, he said, “You make me very happy.”

Aroha, with hairy legs and a mouth full of foam, glanced away from the mirror to grin messily at him. “That’s ‘cause I’m the shit, eh? The most magical woman you’ve ever met.”

“You are.” Mako smiled at her, at her high ponytail and soft, oversized T-shirt. He reached out with his foot to run his toes up the length of her calf. “Do you want to get married?”

Aroha spit into the sink and began to run water into their glass so that she could rinse her mouth. Instead of answering outright, she asked, “Are you going to get me a ring?” She came to knee her way between Mako’s legs, hands going to his shoulders, to the sides of his face, invading him always. “I deserve a  _ ring _ . Fourteen carat gold, princess cut.”

Mako turned his head to kiss the inside of her left wrist. She was never conventional – seemed to resent orthodoxy with an almost poisonous fervor, in fact – so he asked, “Do you genuinely want that?”

“Baby, if you get me a ring I might actually punch you in the face.”

They exchanged a look in which the full degree of their mutual insanity was clearly communicated. Aroha moved in to kiss him, but before she could reach his lips, Mako surged upward, grabbed her by the waist, and threw her over his shoulder, where she giggled and giggled as he carried her into the bedroom. In bed, they took all of their clothes off and made love of the thoughtless sort, their passion no longer the bright pop of fireworks in the night, but the searing course of Hawaiian magma beneath the Earth that always threatened to show its hot red face to the unprepared and the ill-protected. Two days later, when he brought dinner home from Ortega, Mako casually dropped into Aroha’s lap a velvet ring box, saying, “I’ll be paying for it for the next year, but you’re worth it.”

“Oh my God!”

“Are you going to punch me in the face?” He put his head by her shoulder, offering himself up as a sacrifice. “Are you going to do it? Do it.”

She pulled him in by the jaw and crushed their mouths together, kissed his chin, his nose, his fluttering brown eyelids. Rather than putting the ring on her finger, she wore it around her neck on a thin gold chain – “So I won’t lose it,” came her short and sweet excuse.

Nothing changed between them, save for the nominal fact of their engagement. Their shared life was still fueled primarily by lovemaking, good wine, and various illegal substances. At the start of August, Aroha disappeared to Indonesia to spend quality time with komodo dragons, and again, she allowed Mako no input in the matter – just called him from the airport saying, “I’ll see you in two weeks.” When she came back, she walked into the house at 11:46 PM with all of her suitcases, looked at his unimpressed and deeply wounded expression, and announced, “I feel off.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, and let a fork clatter with a harsh, metallic loudness against the bottom of the sink. He tried not to sound too invested in the question, wanting more than anything to be the kind of ghost to her that she had been to him.

“I don’t know.” She kicked her shoes off and came to fall on the couch. Yelling into the kitchen, where he was: “I’m making a doctor’s appointment tomorrow! Can you come rub my feet?!”

Mako put the dish he was washing back down into the sink full of soapy water. He sat on the sofa, pulled Aroha into his lap, and kissed her silly, murmuring, “Don’t feel off. You’re home. It’ll be okay.”

He didn’t know that Aroha had no concept of home, that her natural state was roaming, running, never sitting still in one place. She never corrected him – just melted into his arms and let him call her his. 

Within the week, Aroha was visiting her primary care physician with such vague complaints as “I feel queasy” and “My skin is itchy.” Dr. McQuire asked her some questions, told her to pee in a cup, ran off to Egypt for twenty-seven minutes, then came back and asked her, “Who’s doing your neonatal care?”

Aroha blinked. “Excuse me?”

Dr. McQuire gave her a dull, almost comical look. “You do know you’re pregnant, right?”

Without warning, Aroha began to laugh so hard her stomach started to hurt. Insanely, she wondered if she'd miscarry from laughter. As soon she left the doctor’s office, she got right on her cellphone. Marjory asked her, “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.” Sitting in her car in front of a red light, Aroha pulled her shirt up and inspected her belly, searching for irregularities, for any sign of the creature within. “We haven’t used a condom in months, I don’t know what I expected. I don’t know, I don’t –  _ ugh _ . Kids are cute, right?”

Marjory, an OB/GYN, made a noise of wry acknowledgement. “I don’t know, bubs. I stop seeing the mums after the rugrats are born.”

“I can’t be a mum.” Aroha looked up and saw an old woman crossing the street with who could easily be assumed was her granddaughter, the young one holding the lady’s hand unoccupied by a cane and skipping along the asphalt, long-haired and beautiful. “I didn’t have one. How the hell am I supposed to do this?”

“Uh, with Mako?”

“Oh, yeah.” Aroha laughed. “My boyfriend.” She went home and waited five hours to tell him, waited until after they’d eaten fried oysters for dinner and gotten in bed to watch late-night television till they fell asleep in the morning’s wee hours. 

To this day, Mako thinks it was so shitty of him to think, immediately following her announcement, “What am I going to tell Jem?” – a thought that was trailed shortly by “How are we going to ruin this child?” and then, finally, the more sensible, appropriate, and accurate realization of “I’m going to be a father.” He thinks it was so shitty of him to nearly vomit in his anxiety, to not smile or cry but say, “I need to go to the bathroom,” and then breathe hard over the toilet bowl for three minutes while Aroha threw cruel euphemisms for abortion around in the next room, all of which only increased his apprehension and bodily disgust. Thus began the slow, gradual process of the singular fact of their shared parenthood taking root within them permanently. How would they cope? What would they do? Would they need to change their driver’s licenses for this?

They threw names around. Almost once a week, one of them would come home saying something like, “I was in line for coffee earlier and there was a guy there named Bam, and I thought, how cool would it be to be named Bam?” or “I thought of Stella, but does that sound too white? What’s the Maori word for star?” When Aroha complained of itching, Mako scratched her all over her body. When she farted over dinner, he invested in a whoopee cushion and bounced up and down in his seat so she wouldn’t feel alone. When – after her body had ballooned scarily and her hips began to flare and her breasts began to broaden and she became a vaguely waddling, incorrigibly horny, unmedicated, delightfully short-tempered, beautiful porpoise of a woman – she had the good fortune of developing hemorrhoids, he got her to lie on the bed with no panties on and rubbed ointment into her most private and sore spot. There was never any doubt that he loved her after that, that he would stay with her through just about anything, provided that she wanted him to.

Mako remembers the scariest moment of her pregnancy. He remembers the beginning of her second trimester, when it all became real – her stomach popping, the head on the ultrasound, baby’s heartbeat, them talking in the car. He remembers the night in week seventeen that she asked him to go get sauerkraut just after twelve o’clock, and as he stood and stirred it on the stove, they bickered and he panicked and Aroha blurted out, “I don’t even know why I’m doing this.”

“Doing what?”

“Having this baby. I’m so fucking scared and uncomfortable I could die.”

This infuriated and terrified Mako. He came out of the kitchen to look at her, to watch her watch the television with a faraway, angry sort of look on her face. “What are you saying?” he asked, almost yelling.

“My mum killed herself right after I was born.”

Mako appeared as though he’d been slapped. “You never told me that.”

“Why would I tell you that?” Aroha scoffed and shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. It never mattered. You never asked.”

“How the fuck am I supposed to ask you about that? Gee, Aroha, I’ve never heard you talk about your mum. Sounds like she might be a sensitive subject. Did she happen to off herself when you needed her most?”

“You’re right, Mako. You’re always right. It’s all my fault for not opening up to you.”

He served her sauerkraut in their best crystal bowl – angry clatter of glass against glass on the coffee table – and went to bed by himself, phantom pressure of Jem’s hands in his and over the center of his back. He sometimes felt he knew nothing about the woman he loved, who would be the mother of his child. They were both crazy, both idiotically damaged and fantastically bad at talking about the inner filling of their lives. They had no business bringing life that would inevitably resemble themselves into the world.

Just as he began to drift into uneasy, prickly unconsciousness, Aroha came running to the bedside, crying, “I felt it!”

“What?” he croaked.

“The baby! I felt it!” Aroha climbed into bed beside him and grabbed his hand to press its palm flat against the protruding roundness of her stomach. They laid wordlessly together for almost thirty minutes before a second fluttering came, after which they laughed like it was the end of the world and held each other, scared out of their minds and so thrilled it was hard to bear. 

In truth, the fear and the excitement never really went away – not after Kory was born a month premature, drowning in her own fluids, a fish from the start; not after Mako spent the last two weeks of twenty-three and a half years of mounting mental illness in a psychiatric hospital and came out medicated and simultaneously closer to and farther away from himself than he’d ever been; not after the move to Porirua, pressed metal ceiling in the kitchen, the day they took baby Kory to Lyall Bay and snapped cute and sandy pictures on a disposable camera, summer days with plastic kiddie pools and Aroha flying off to Paraburdoo again; not after the years of separation, the move to New Orleans, and so many Skype calls that all amounted to nothing. Mako experiences a sort of full-body quickening – his heart a baby quivering in the womb of his thorax – the day he drives to Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport to pick Aroha up. Kory sits shotgun, staring at everything flitting by outside the passenger side window and pulling at the hem of her T-shirt over and over.

“I’m too fat,” she mutters. Mako doesn’t know if he hears her correctly.

“What?”

“I’m too fat.” 

“Oh, hush.” Mako pulls the car along the long driveway flanking the airport terminal, searching for the great blue sign for United Airlines. “You’re not fat. You’re precious. You’re the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Mummy is like  _ this _ thin, though.” Kory holds up her pinkie finger. “What is she gonna say–”

“She’s not gonna say anything, and if she does, you can ignore her.” It’s woefully inadequate in the face of her teenage angst – which has the size, ferocity, and approximate appearance of a Godzilla or a King Kong – but Mako leans across the center console and kisses the side of Kory’s face regardless, reaching a hand over to squeeze her puppy fat, the adorable surplus of her belly. “You are everything, okay? I don’t want you to forget that while your mum’s here.”

Kory looks at him – wide-eyed, tight-lipped – and he sees Aroha’s terrified face in hers. The anxiety that sprung into being in anticipation of her birth, the congenital restlessness that had and has always been there. When Aroha comes strutting out of the terminal like a hundred-pound supermodel – dragging her suitcases behind her, the dark mane of her hair fluttering wildly with every step – a look comes over Kory like she may explode into many girlish, ghostly pieces, her stepping out of the Jetta with a weight and fifteen year old appearance Aroha probably won’t even recognize. Mako slides out of the car and comes to stand at Kory’s side, waiting for Aroha to see him.

“God, you’re so old!” she cries at his silver hair, hastening her steps so that she can throw herself at him, her arms coming up to hook around his neck. She kisses his cheek once, twice, three times and releases a high, dolphinesque laugh, and there are her hands on his face, his shoulders, squeezing his sides, invading him as they always have. “Look at you, you’re like, like – a whole person!” She looks at Kory and gasps for three long, positively histrionic seconds, palm to her chest, eyes the size of small moons. “You’re so big, oh my God!” Kissing her daughter’s face, sinking fingers into the girl’s hair: “What has this man of mine been feeding you? You’re so perfect, you’re so –  _ aah! _ I can’t believe you!” As she holds Kory close to her chest, rocking her back and forth, she looks back at Mako and says, “Where’s Jeremiah? Don’t tell me he’s at work. I can’t believe he would deign to miss my arrival in this perfect city, on this perfect day.” Then, flapping a hand in front of her face: “ _ Lord _ , but it’s hot, eh? I guess you weren’t kidding about the temperature!”

Finally afforded the opportunity to speak, Mako puts on his most even and featureless smile. “Hi,” he says, speeding past everything that has just come out of Aroha’s mouth. He reaches for the bag still slung over her left shoulder. “Let me get that for you.”

Aroha is here, and it’s about four years too late. Mako would say he couldn’t wait to see how the week will turn out, but he’d be lying. At the very least, the act would be on-brand.


	20. 20

#  _ 20 _

“When it’s raining while the sun is shining, the devil is beating his wife,” Kory tells him in a whisper.

“Who told you that?” he asks, arms around her, eyes closed in the blue dark of Saturday morning. He pulls her in closer, listening to and just plain feeling the rhythmic expansion and compression of her chest, her full puppy stomach. 

Kory makes a sound like  _ mmnh _ . Her body is warm in the bed, her emotional energy this early in the morning tight and suspended somewhere high in the air. “I don’t remember. I heard it at school.”

“In New Zealand, we call them sunshowers.” Mako laughs, low and breathy. “I can’t believe I’m telling you that. It’s where you’re from.”

“Can we go back?” Kory asks. “Just to visit, I mean. I barely even have an accent anymore, it’s sad.”

“Maybe so.” Mako opens his eyes, and there is the sea – its calm blue waves, rays of filtered sunlight piercing them, two-dimensional tropical fish slowly swimming, his porpoise daughter among them. They are in Kory’s room in the minutes before nine o’clock, both of them solidly, palpably nervous to begin the second day of Aroha in New Orleans. Yesterday was a lot. Yesterday was three heart attacks with a small side of hemorrhagic stroke. Yesterday was Aroha coming in and rearranging every part of their lives with the mere thing of her presence, commenting as she has before on the so-called “adultness” of Mako’s “North American habitat” and wondering out loud about Kory’s “adolescent existence,” her “development as a young sapling in an old world” or some such pretentious bullshit that Mako literally had to suppress nausea in response to. When Mako’s alarm goes off, they make their way into the bathroom, brush their teeth together, talk with their eyes in lieu of their mouths, and then head downstairs so that Kory can wake her mother and Mako can find something suitable to prepare for breakfast. He decides on hashed potatoes, sliced oranges, and the remainder of a loaf of bread thrown summarily in the toaster, oh my.

Halfway through the hashbrowns, his heart leaning toward the part of the house where Jem is still in the process of waking up, Mako is accosted by an alien slap on the ass.

“Good morning, my dearest,” Aroha purrs into his left ear, kissing him ever so boldly on the neck and yanking forth in him the urge to get on all fours and crawl away, him wondering why he ever thought it was a good idea to let her back into his house. She wraps herself around his body – barefoot, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and a pair of lacy yellow underwear – and lays her head against the back of his shoulder. With the glaring exception of the raging A/C and the overall feeling of being eaten alive, it’s 2009 again and he’s making her breakfast out of the unmitigated adoration in his heart.

He wants to say, “Don’t touch me.” What comes out is, “You eat potatoes, right?”

“Are potatoes animal products?” When he shakes his head, she squeezes him. “I didn’t think so.”

“How long has this been going on, eh?” Mako shuffles the bits of potato in his skillet with his spatula, gripping the utensil’s rubber red handle for dear life. “If I recall correctly, your last stint with vegetarianism lasted only three months. Nothing like unborn fish to kick you right off your high horse, am I right?”

“Why are you so  _ bitter _ , Mako?” With this, Aroha pulls away from him to lean against the countertop directly adjacent to the stove. For the first time this morning, Mako can look at her through the glasses he wears when he’s too lazy for contacts and see her face unwrinkled in midlife, the oh so charming mess of her hair, the strange and pretty paleness of her irises. “You eat meat,” she says. “Why do you care about the morality of my dietary habits?”

“I don’t.”

“You could have fooled me.”

Kory and Jem come into the room at that moment. The coexistence of so many parts and times of Mako’s life is almost too overwhelming to bear. He turns off the burner he’s working on, and there is Jem coming over to awkwardly kiss the back of his head, to nod and wave a little at Aroha.

“Morning.”

Aroha smiles so brightly the whole room is engulfed in scorching light. “Good morning, Jeremiah. I trust my presence didn’t deter any of your nighttime activities with Mako here.”

Mako shoots Aroha a sideways look. “My daughter is right there.”

“Uh, she’s mine, too,” Aroha retorts in a whiny, deeply infuriating sort of voice. Kory, for her part, is pulling a bottle of probiotic strawberry-banana juice out of the refrigerator and snorting ambiguously – maybe laughing, maybe just making noise to be making noise. Jem blinks as though he’s been slapped.

“Last night was pretty uneventful,” he concedes.

“Jem,” Mako says, the name weighted with all kinds of stop-this and please-don’t energies.

“It was!” Jem brushes a hand briefly against the small of Mako’s back and then, passing back out of the room to go sit at the dining table, adds, “It’s not every day hell freezes over. I guess you were exhausted from the stress of it all.”

Aroha watches Jem’s retreat with a faintly curious, just as faintly confused expression. After he disappears behind the breakfast bar, she turns back to Mako and asks at a volume perceptible to everyone in a three yard radius (thus, everyone in the house save Mum), “What was that about?”

“We used to have this joke that the next time you’d come visit, hell would freeze over,” Kory puts in oh so helpfully from where she’s pouring herself a glass of juice. Without missing a beat, she holds the juice bottle up and asks her mother, “Do you want some?”

Just as unflappable, Aroha grins and replies, “Sure!” She bumps Mako with her hip, watching him empty a small mountain of hashbrowns onto a plate. “Breakfast time?”

“Breakfast time.” Mako balances the potatoes, the oranges, and the toast in his arms and carries it all out into the dining area. “No one is in any way obligated to kiss the cook.”

Jem takes his hand and kisses the very top of it. Kory pecks at his jaw, giggling at the tickle of facial hair against her mouth. Aroha mimics their daughter and gets him on the other side of his face, sending him plummeting spiritually into the ground and leadening his every action – his arms heavy, head suddenly a thousand pounds. The clink of silverware and ceramic dishes grounds him in the weirdness of the moment, the surreality of having these three people he loves so much sharing his space. 

Today, they will go to the Audubon Zoo. For a second of pure, inexplicable insanity, Mako will consider letting Aroha take the car and giving her and Kory some perhaps much-needed alone time, but he will be forced to reassess this inclination after Jem reminds him of how bad a driver he was when he first came from New Zealand and then, shortly after this reminder, Kory corners him in the bathroom to tell him how nervous she is at the prospect of being alone with her mother. “It’s like I’ve never met her before, it’s weird,” she will say, sitting on the toilet seat while he attempts to do something with his thoroughly uncooperative hair. 

He will look at her reflection in the mirror above the sink. “You don’t have anything to be scared of, you know,” he’ll say, like a hypocrite.

She’ll frown. Push her bare big toe into the grout between two floor tiles. “I know,” will come her nether-voice whine. “I’d just feel better if you were there.”

So he’ll come with them. Jem, the asshole, will stay home with Mum and watch  _ Forensic Files _ for five hours, his phone at the ready, his so-called supportive husband stance on and raring to go. They’ll kiss at the door. Aroha, in her vegan watercolor-print leggings and ethically sourced tank top, will watch them as if she is indulging in some delightfully droll inside joke. Mako will get behind the wheel with sweat already accumulating in his armpits and on his forehead, missing the bandana he left in his top dresser drawer. Kory will plug her phone into the AUX channel and send Frank Ocean bleeding through the Jetta’s poor old speakers, singing, “ _ In the wake of a hurricane; dark skin of a summer shade... _ ”

Traffic will be slow and Mako will fuss at it. “Ugh, why are you so slow?!” he’ll bitch at the Mazda puttering along in front of them and then, as it slides molasses-like into the adjacent lane, cry out, “Thank you! Goodbye! Poof, begone!” Kory will laugh at him from the backseat. Aroha will say something to the effect that she’s missed Mako – his grumpiness, his uncompromising displeasure with the world or some other backhanded, shitty thing like that – and Mako will act like he hasn’t heard anything at all, just lean back in his seat and keep his hand at six o’clock on the wheel, thinking about the dream he used to have of being trapped in a monkey house at the zoo so he won’t have to acknowledge, for the moment, the change fifteen years in the making occurring within him. He was a boy who made chirpy noises at primates and grew golden hair on the back of his neck and shoulders. He hung from his fingers and toes. The monkeys taught him how. 

Tickets will be $29.95 at the gate. Aroha will treat them all, her generosity as effusive as her personality. 

“Just as long as you buy me ice cream later,” she will mention, sort of offhandedly, to Mako.

“You’re on,” he’ll say.

They’ll detour straight to the reptile house. Aroha, alive and in her comfort zone, will wax poetical about the panther chameleon, whose generic name  _ Furcifer _ derives from the Latin root  _ furci _ – meaning “forked” – in reference to the faintly adorable, bifurcated shape of its feet; whose females are about half the size of its males (a fact that Aroha refers to as, quote, “one of many fairly tragic cases of sexual dimorphism”); whose tongues can extend at about twenty-six body lengths per second and are constituted as a complex arrangement of bone, muscle, and sinew; and whose changes in coloring are not, by the way, dictated by their immediate surroundings as pop culture would have one believe, but are instead affected by temperature, mood, and light. She will coo and gush over the komodo dragons – their exceptional status among reptiles as group hunters; their dominance of local Indonesian ecosystems; their perfect, rough chain-mail skin; their perpetually blood-tinged saliva – the yucky, icky, gross intensity of it all. She will die to hold the astoundingly beautiful, vibrantly yellow eyelash viper – will announce to the zoo attendant present that she’s a herpetologist, don’t worry, “I know what I’m doing! I could probably even tell you the antitoxin I’ll need if I get bitten!” She will then pout and whine like a little girl when her requests are summarily denied.

“There’s probably some piece of shit, backwater place in Chalmette or Kenner where they’ll let us hold the snakes,” Mako will note, not feeling generous or sympathetic so much as just annoyed at Aroha’s histrionics and incredibly invested in their cessation.

“Will they be  _ venomous _ , though?” Aroha will ask. “Will there be the threat of crippling physical harm or death?”

Mako will shake his head. Aroha will stick her lip out and snivel about it all the way to the sea lions.

In front of exhibits of imprisoned animals with indeterminate levels of personal happiness, Aroha and Kory will snap selfies and other assorted pictures of each other on their smartphones. Mother and daughter throwing up peace signs with rainbow-hued parrots in the aviary; mother and daughter fake kissing the ring-tailed lemurs in the primate exhibition. Mako will carefully avoid appearing in the vast majority of such photographs so as to eschew the implication that they are actually a family or something like that – him even more sensitive and childish than Kory is, probably, about their broken home or whatever the hell kind of fucked up thing they are in the years succeeding his and Aroha’s separation. He won’t have fun. He’ll have the exact opposite of fun, in fact – misery, let’s say – even when Kory makes cute faces at the pelicans and threatens to send his heart into some high, faraway place in his body; even when Aroha tells the story of how she almost went into ornithology instead of herpetology (how, for fifteen minutes, the fields aren’t all that different from an evolutionary perspective); even when he buys lavender-flavored Haagen-Dazs for the girls and they feed it to him with tiny plastic spoons, giggling in unison when the purplish confection drips into his beard, Aroha wiping it out with the saliva-slick pad of her thumb; even at the Elephant Pavilion, where Kory and Aroha stand side by side with their arms around each other, entranced by the lifting of trunks and the toddling along of precious gray calves.

Kory will hug him out of nowhere while he’s unlocking the car.

“What’s up, fish?” he’ll ask, arms around her.

“Nothing,” she’ll reply, and she’ll be smiling like he hasn’t seen her smile in years. 

In the Whole Foods on Magazine, while they peruse avocados, asparagus, bell peppers, and eggplants, a heavyset woman in a fluorescently pink T-shirt will look at Aroha and Kory passing legumes between each other and say to the younger one in a thick Louisiana drawl, “You look just like ya mom, sha. I bet you hear that all the time.” 

Kory will put a smile that means nothing to a stranger and say, “Not really.” Aroha will sing the praises of fried eggplant, and Mako will smoke two cigarettes in the parking lot and text Jem for status updates.

#    
  


**Today** 1:33 PM

**mako gehringer  
** how are u guys doing?

**jeremiah tui  
** I tried to microwave popcorn and it came out all black ☹ I need you to come do all the most basic things for me

I hope you know I love you

Your mum wants to know if you can get her some ice blocks. I think she misses you. She has that look on her face.  


**mako gehringer  
** the sleepy and somewhat faraway look?

**jeremiah tui**

Yes that one

**mako gehringer  
** i miss her too (DON’T tell her that)

i’ll get her the banana popsicles she likes

**jeremiah tui  
** How are you, pretty man? How was the zoo?

**mako gehringer  
** i only want to go home a lot, so. 

i saw a lot of beautiful animals and got very sad because they’re not where they’re supposed to be

why can’t i just not think about anything? why do i have to ruin everything by getting in my feelings??

kory is happier than she’s been in a long time and i’m lowkey jealous? is that ridiculous?? please tell me i’m ridiculous and that you don’t know why you love me

**jeremiah tui  
** You’re ridiculous and I don’t know why I love you

**mako gehringer  
** thanks

you always know how to make me feel better

#    
  


Just as Mako is finishing cigarette number two, Aroha and Kory will come out to the car with bagfuls of fresh veggies, wearing smiles with the breadth of summer and looking like fraternal twins of similar height and disparate weight. Mako will experience a flash of the clastic life he could be living – New Orleans, 2025, him married to this lovely woman, homeschooling their lovelier daughter, all of them floating down the bayou on a restored teakwood houseboat, possibly alcoholic and filled with such anger and such glee – and he will yearn for soft banana frostiness, wonder how unhappy he could possibly be and still live, marvel at his capacity for suffering and a child’s capacity for forgetfulness and forgivefulness. They will drive home. He’ll be bitter, but it will be an open secret the likes of which will not be discussed for the rest of the week.

Tonight, Aroha will favor them with dinner: stuffed bell peppers and a bottle of Rosé, eaten on the living room floor as per her desires for “whimsy” and “cute, familial intimacy.” In a moment of extreme pettiness that Mako will secretly laugh about for the next two weeks, Mum will order ribs from The Joint and spitefully eat them at the dining table, occasionally moaning with delight at the lusciousness of medium-rare beef and, when he passes through on the way to the kitchen to get a napkin for Jem, loudly offering Mako a bite or two of the sweet, tragic carcass. Aroha will, uninterrupted for well over thirty minutes, talk about molecular gastronomy and various theories of eating (including, most notably, a brief tangent on the hypothetical emotions experienced by carrots before and during their consumption), and Jem will sort of scratch his stubble in a way that only Mako will register as vaguely annoyed, and Kory will eat her mother’s words up like dessert and later, while she’s brushing her teeth before bed, wonder out loud about becoming a vegetarian (or at least a pescetarian), and Mako will drink three glasses of wine and nearly fall and break a tooth while standing up to clear off the coffee table, and Jem will catch him by his belt loop, and Aroha will laugh and ask, “Since when are you a sloppy drunk?”

Mako, tipsy, will carry his plate into the kitchen and reply, “Since I broke up with you.”

“Is that a dig?” Aroha will ask.

“It’s not,” Mako will say. It will and it won’t be a lie.

In bed, Jem will kiss Mako’s left shoulder through his T-shirt and ask, “What’s up with you?”

The slippery, grapey part of Mako will reach back and grasp Jem’s hip and say, “Today was perfect.” He will breathe moist, warm air into his pillow; the grapes will cry, “My daughter is happy. That was the point of this, this whole… mess.”

Jem’s body will mold to his like a second skin. “I love you,” will come the reassuring whisper.

“I love you, too,” the grapes will say, and Aroha will sleep downstairs and the weirdness of it all will stubbornly endure.

On Sunday, Aroha will want to go out. She will put Kory to bed (meaning she will crawl in beside the girl and gossip loudly about Kory’s schoolmates and the boys of her past for thirty minutes, all pretty feminine giggling at the top of their lungs, the sounds of their mirth bleeding through the walls, Mako taken into the adjacent universe where this is what every night sounds like), and then she will step into Mako and Jem’s bedroom where they’re both sucked into their various technological devices and announce, “I want to go dancing.”

Jem, in his supportive rudeness, won’t make any move to acknowledge her presence, and this will be faintly hilarious. Mako, on the other hand, will look up from his MacBook and say, “It’s Sunday night.”

“So? We’re in New Orleans, babe.” Comfortably, as if she’s a member of the household instead of a guest, Aroha will throw herself onto the foot of the mattress and bounce a little, grinning wide and impish. “Why are you even living here if you’re not out partying every night?”

“I personally like the doomed real estate market and the two distinct seasons: summer and Hell.”

“There’s also the food,” Jem will put in.

“Yeah, and the fact that strangers will talk to you about their child support payments and the results of their latest STD test literally anywhere, at any time.”

“Is that a hypothetical or are you speaking from experience?”

“I didn’t tell you about that guy in line at the pharmacy? He also told me that he could tell I grew up poor – or like, at least not rich – because my teeth were fucked up.”

“Well, that might be the rudest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“I  _ know!  _ I couldn’t even say anything, I was so–”

Abruptly, Aroha will produce a long, loud groan of interjection, fixing Mako with a wide-eyed look of disdain and disbelief. “You guys are so boring!” she’ll cry, and Mako and Jem will exchange brief, probing glances.

“I like boring,” Jem will say, then turn back to his Kindle, looking faintly self-satisfied.

Before Mako can question or echo the sentiment, Aroha’s hand will appear on his naked ankle and every muscle in his body will tense. Her face will be the picture of beautiful beseeching, and she’ll say, “Come out with me, Mako,” with an uncalculated quirk in her left eyebrow, a girlish honesty in her expression, mess of hair falling all around her shoulders, her basically unchanged from the day he met her. Moved an inch, he will sigh.

“Whatever.”

Aroha, half-horizontal, will do a little hip-popping dance of victory. “That’s my boy,” she’ll say. His skin will crawl and he will feel the sting of immediate regret.

She’ll find the event most likely to cause his heart to jump right out of his chest, still beating, and disappear into the night: Lingerie Night at The Willow, its dress code self-explanatory and skimpy on the Sabbath day. Mako will watch her pull a lacy, partially see-through bra and a paper-thin silk robe out of her suitcase and ask why she brought such things with her to New Orleans, and Aroha will give him a dull, kind of unimpressed look and reply, “You didn’t think I wasn’t going to prepare for every eventuality, did you?”

Mako will blink.

“One of those eventualities being that I would have sex, I mean,” Aroha will pin on as if it is an afterthought.

Mako will blink again, mumble, “I don’t know why I’m surprised,” and go upstairs to strip down to his underwear and put on his favorite sparkly kimono. He will kiss Jem and, when the man looks at him with an ambiguously unhappy expression – something at the intersection of how-dare-you-abandon-me and I-hope-you-know-what-you're-doing – say, “I promise I’ll blow you when I get home if you stop looking at me like that.”

Jem’s face will instantly smooth over and gel into flawless serenity. “Gotcha.”

Aroha will wear heels. This will bump her up from five feet and three inches to five feet and seven inches. Mum will roll into the living room just as they’re leaving the house and exclaim, “You don’t have any clothes on!”

Mako will reply, “It’s like that dream I’ve always had of accidentally going out in my underwear, eh?” He’ll kiss Mum on her stubbly head, uncovered by a scarf. “Don’t wait up.”

“Fat chance of that,” Mum will reply with a snort. Everyone will be displeased with Mako, and he will blame nobody but himself, him being dragged half-willingly out the door by his insane ex-fiancée, plugging his keys into the Jetta’s dusty ignition, Hall and Oates on the throwback radio station at 10:36 PM, the Crescent City always more alive in the inappropriate and booming nighttime.

The Willow will be full of students from Loyola and Tulane and young hipsters in their sexiest undergarments. It will be a Childish Gambino, pink velvet shine, sparkling metallic confetti and balloons kind of night; a Moscow Mule from the thick-armed bartender, glazed doughnut makeup, “me and your mama used to do this all the time,” nip-slips in the private public sort of evening. While Aroha body-rocks with two women half her age and looks for prepubescent drug dealers in the bar’s darkest corners, Mako will languish at the bar and do what he does best at the age of thirty-eight – drink cocktail after cocktail while playing Lumosity games on his phone, unsuccessfully avoiding conversation with the randos that make it their business to pester him all the while.

“Can I see your tattoo?” a young person of ambiguous gender and with blue hair will ask him, hovering a hand over Mako’s left arm where it is covered by his kimono sleeve.

“No,” Mako will say without looking up from his phone. This will not deter his new friend.

“You look so cool!” they’ll cry.

“I know,” Mako will reply.

“Are you in your sixties? Are you British?” Blue Hair will be leaning uncomfortably into Mako’s space, nursing a Heineken, looking fuzzy around the eyes. “You have an accent.”

“I’m not British.”

“Oh.” Blue Hair will scowl. “That means you’re Australian, right?”

“No. I’m from a magical island in Jupiter’s great red spot.”

“Dude, that’s fucking awesome.” Blue Hair will clink their beer against Mako’s copper mug in cheers and take a quick sip of lager. “I know you’re being sarcastic and everything, but still, dude. Cool. I’ve always wanted to meet an alien.”

Mako will take a long sip from his Moscow Mule and say nothing. He’ll create a new high score in Memory Matrix and will silently, internally rejoice; it is these small victories that count more and more as his life rambles on.

“Hey, is that woman with you?” Blue Hair will ask.

“Probably not,” Mako will reply without looking. 

“I think she is, dude.” Blue Hair will make a shrill, kind of throaty noise. “Oooh, shit, she’s really pretty. Oh, shit, man, I think she’s coming over here. Should I give her my number?”

At that moment, a hard, distinctly Arohan weight will fall against Mako’s back and willowy arms will wind around his middle, equally willowy hands pressing into his stomach, pinching at the short hair growing there. There will be Aroha’s mouth against the shell of his left ear, the words coming out of it: “Come dance with me, baby.”

“No,” Mako will retort without hesitation. He’ll look up and find Blue Hair staring at the two of them with bugged-out eyes, and this, like Jem’s standoffishness from earlier, will be kind of hysterical to him. Without meaning to, he will release a brief, blustery laugh that Aroha will interpret as evidence of his susceptibility to a change of heart.

“You told me you were coming out with me!” she’ll whine.

“I perceive no violation of this.” Mako will point emphatically at the ground directly beneath him. “I’m here, we’re out – that’s all that was promised.”

“What happened to you?” Forcefully, hurricane strong when she wants to be, Aroha will turn him around on his barstool and fix him with hard, pale eyes. Through the thick, drugging haze of his buzz and the devastating atmosphere of the club in general, he’ll smell her coconut body wash, observe the shine of glitter on her skin, and he’ll remember what it was like to be impossibly confused and falling in love with her, to want nothing more than to make her love him. Aroha will frown and say, “You’re so different from the way you used to be. What are you afraid of? Having a good time? Falling in love again?”

Mako, heedless of Blue Hair’s blatant observation of this conversation (which straddles the borderline between dead serious and just plain hilarious), will throw his arms into the air and cry out, “I’m old!”

“You’re  _ not _ old, though!” Aroha will argue. “You’re not even forty!”

“I’m a parent with bipolar disorder and a nine-to-five job!”

“And, wonder of wonders, your legs are not broken!” With this, Aroha will pull him to his feet and into the throng of writhing, jumping, twisting young bodies; into a space with little to no oxygen and borderline solar levels of heat. There will be her body pressed up against his, skin against skin, her hands in his hair, her screaming into the music, into his face. Mako’s pride will pull itself into odd, misshapen configurations – him too vain to just give into Aroha and too self-conscious to just stand still in a room full of pinwheeling, bip-bopping, perpetually-moving others. 

“I can’t stand you!” he’ll yell with half-cocked honesty into Aroha’s ear. She’ll pull him in close.

“Join the fucking club!” she’ll reply with a grin. Then they will dance.

They’ll dance like they never left each other. Like this is their typical Sunday night – putting the kid to bed and then painting the town red. Mako will allow Aroha to hold him like her favorite half-naked body – hell, he’ll cling to her as well, arms around her middle, sweaty cheek to her sweaty cheek – and to a supernatural bassline that plays itself up each vertebra in the building, they will curve and bend and rock until it hurts, until Mako can feel every year in his life and his and Kory’s Bodhisattva Beautiful yoga routine from the previous week, screwing his muscles out and around so that they scream, so that he’s one with his internal whateverthefuck, calm and centered and present. Except he won’t be present. His drunk will be catching up to him and he will be out with Aroha, who he once thought of as his soulmate. He will be dragged out into the street and to the nearby Chevron station, where Aroha will buy a joint for twenty dollars and they will sit out on the sidewalk in their underwear, smoking it together.

“When’s the last time you had one of these, my love?” Aroha will ask, passing the joint off to Mako and exhaling opaque smoke through her nostrils.

“It’s been a couple of years.” Mako will take a drag and welcome the slow influx of brain fog and mild euphoria, the acute distortion of time and space that is so much more intense and boring than the run of the mill distortion he experiences on an hourly basis. “My best friends used to have a weed hookup in my neighborhood, but then he moved to Denver and I got too lazy to find someone else.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Aroha will say with a laugh, and as she sticks the butt of the joint into her mouth, Mako will squint up into the blackish, light-polluted sky and make a groaning noise of utter displeasure.

“Why do we always do that?” he will ask. Watching Aroha puff, he will shake his head and frown and say, “Belittle each other like that. Why do we do that?”

“I thought it was the most fun part of being broken up with you,” Aroha will reply. She will be grinning in the golden dark. “Can’t have sex anymore, so we get off on deriding each other mercilessly.” 

“Speak for yourself.”

“It’s what I’m good at.”

In a moment that will haunt Mako for months, Aroha will look at him with eyes like clear glass potato-peelers, will smile, will reach out and touch his tired face and stroke her thumb along the prominence of his left cheekbone. Breathing cannabis, she will say, “I do miss you, you know. You in our bed, naked, happy. I still have that bed, you know. Still sleep in it.” She will lean in. “I like to think you miss me, too.”

Mako will close his eyes and say, “Of course I do,” because it is the truth.

Aroha will  _ tsk _ . “I knew it. I’m like that worm that burrows in and gets under your skin and never leaves.”

“I love a good insect metaphor.”

With ample warning, Aroha will kiss Mako. It will be the warm, dry press of lips and the sharing of breath, a callback to their summer of babymaking and living it up in Newtown, and Mako will let it happen for all of ten seconds – Aroha opening her mouth to his, laying her hand down against the inside of his elbow, the heavy scent of marijuana, the stray dogs chasing each other up and down the street – until the touching all becomes so unbearable that he flinches away as if he’s been burnt. Aroha will look at him, her expression a little girl bleeding heart open wound, and say, “I thought you missed me.”

“I do,” and Mako will laugh.

“Why are you laughing? Why did you do that?”

“I’m so out of love with you, I’m sorry.” The laughter will pick up in intensity. Mako will reach for the joint and it will evade him. “I just… I’m, I’m-”

“Mako.” Aroha, injured, will shake her head and put the desired marijuana cigarette in her mouth. “You don’t have to–”

“No, I want to say this, because I’ve been trying to for years and I just couldn’t because not enough time had gone by yet and my brain has been so fucked up because of you and Kora and my family and everything, everything.” Emboldened by alcohol and his own stupid, ridiculous fatigue, by the shaking loose of the jagged stones inside of him that took place in the club, Mako will snatch the joint right out of Aroha’s mouth, put it into his, puff for several seconds, then announce with a heart full of mourning, “You made me go crazy. I lost my mind when I met you. I’m not saying that like it’s a bad thing, it’s just a thing that is true. And I need my mind, Aroha, I need it  _ bad _ . I’m trying so hard to get it back.”

Aroha will squint at him. “I don’t think you’re crazy.”

“I  _ am _ crazy!” The frenzied laughter will begin again. “Oh my God, I’m living on a mountain, and there are some days when I’m so close to jumping off of it and never looking back, it’s terrifying. And you…” He’ll grin at her. “I love you, okay, because you can jump off and you’re not scared, you’ll be okay no matter what you do.”

“That’s not true!”

“It isn’t?”

Aroha will scoff and steal the joint back. “No, I make horrible scarring decisions every day.”

“But you make them. And you’re not scared when you make them, are you?”

Aroha will honk with laughter. “That’s because I’m an insane person.”

“Exactly.” Mako will shake his head and the world will tumble around his face like the inside of a washing machine. “I’m just a different kind of crazy and I’m trying not to be. And I mean – not even considering Jem – if we get back together…” He’ll let the words hang out in the air, already middle-aged three seconds in, and Aroha will smoke slowly and look at him as if she understands – as if she understands it all.

“Yeah,” she’ll say.

“Yeah,” he’ll reply. “I adore you still. I adore you always, okay? But I can’t. Never again, I just can’t. You broke the shit out of me.”

Then they will sit there in the weed-smelling night, wordless, kissing forty. “Way to be absolutely brutal,” Aroha will murmur, and hog the rest of the joint because she’s the one who paid for it. For upwards of ten minutes, they will wander around looking for the Jetta. Mako will drive them home – undressed bodies flying through the unusual early May fog. He will climb upstairs, find Jem fast asleep at one in the morning, reschedule the blowjob for the following night, and get three and a half hours of sleep before waking up hungover for work on Monday morning. Will it be worth it?

Perhaps. Mako will not be able to tell.

Aroha will have late lunches with Karla, the pink velvet teddy from Lingerie Night who works in a Crescent City vintage costume shop from which Aroha will purchase strings of carnelian beads and a fuzzy periwinkle sweater for her daughter, a bubblegum pink bob wig and a sequined shift dress for herself. She will munch on beet salad at 1000 Figs and then go back to Karla’s Mid-City apartment to eat acid and make out for three hours. She will drag herself back to Mako’s house all psychedelic and Virgo-colored around the edges, and in this high and distorted state, she will be Kory’s best mother, call the girl her “lovely mermaid kid” and her “prettiest, perfectest one.” Singing a song she heard in her dream the previous night, laughing at the walls and their impenetrable wallness, Aroha will let Kory take her by the hand and drag her upstairs into the girl’s bedroom, where she will decide all at once that the bed, it just, no, doesn’t quite go where it goes. She’ll drag it across the floor with her herculean, cyclone strength and declare the nightstand off, too – it needs to be on the bed’s right side instead of its left. She’ll talk to herself as she works – “This is like, like the grass against my feet inside a conch shell where there’s no wind, and my hair’s down to there and the moon’s in triplicate in the sky…” – and as she lies down on the shag carpet rug and pets it with all of her fingers, Kory will put her head into Mako’s room and say to her father, “I think there’s something wrong with Mummy.”

Feeling mean, Mako will mutter, “What  _ isn’t _ wrong with her?” He’ll get up to go look at Aroha on the floor, nudge her side with his bare toes and ask, “What are you doing?”

Aroha will stare up at him with big, kind of unfocused eyes. “I’m so happy right now,” she’ll say, then burst into tears that Kory will attempt to stay with stuffed animals. Within minutes, Aroha will be buried in plush bodies and faux fur, clinging to Love the unicorn and weeping like it’s the end of her life. Kory will lie on the floor with her until the tears cease, and then they will eat all of the ice cream out of the freezer and Mum will give Mako a sort of unbearable look that tears at his insides – a what's-wrong-with-you? sort of look, a how-could-you? sort of look.

Maybe it will be his fault. It won’t be the first time he’s made a horribly fucked up decision for everyone in his life.

Maybe he shouldn’t have let this happen at all. He’s always been so good at teasing, mocking, and disparaging Aroha about all the things that don’t really matter and so bad at actually telling her no, denying her the things she wants when she wants them badly. Maybe he should have told her not to come at all. Maybe he shouldn’t have picked her up from the airport. Maybe on this first morning before the zoo, he should look her in her face and tell her to do good or get gone, but he doesn’t, won’t. He just passes the potatoes and watches her drink her juice like this whole visit hasn’t been doomed from the moment she bought her plane ticket.

For the next few days, Aroha will sleep through most of the daylight hours. Pick the bacon out of her breakfast scramble, then toddle upstairs to snore and swaddle herself up in Mako and Jem’s bed until the sky has taken on the darker blue shades of early evening and her daughter’s shoulders have adopted a half-hunched position indicative of so much unexpressed tension, so much yearning. At dinner, while Kory talks about school – her excellence in her World Geography class as evidenced by her monopoly over the classroom couch and the blatant favoritism displayed by the much-ballyhooed and still (by Mako’s estimation) pretty suspicious Mr. Katz; Candela’s upcoming birthday party to which certain juniors and, wonder of wonders, a senior will be invited; the fact that she almost got in trouble (on the grounds of, she guesses, general inappropriateness) for licking a dollop of chocolate pudding off of a cement table at recess; her trouble with her algebra homework, general incompetence regarding the quadratic formula – Aroha will text the four numbers she managed to nab at Lingerie Night and ask Mako to pass the wine; ask him make her a screwdriver, please; make sort of perplexed faces at Kory’s utterly normal, functional female adolescence – where are the boys hanging around the house, the faces will ask. Where is the insatiable libido, the running in the streets and the unladylike vulgarity? What happened during the thirty-six weeks Aroha spent spinning Kory into being in her womb, wadding her up like cotton candy? In fact, what happened in the fifteen years since her birth on Kiwi soil to have her turn out so okay, so different from both of her parents in this way?

“You heard me, Aroha?” Mako will ask. “Why don’t you help Kory with her homework?”

“That doesn’t sound very fun,” Aroha will say with her typical uninhibited honesty. Jem, a patent mathematical idiot, will do it instead.

Aroha will give Kory five minutes. Maybe ten, perhaps even twenty on nights when she exudes moderate to high levels of generosity. Sitting together in the living room, mother and daughter will watch something inane and American on television and make conversation about whatever is available – the first few days, it’s the harrowing Louisiana weather; towards the middle of Aroha’s visit, it slides into the discrepancy between American and Kiwi culture – until inevitably, Aroha’s interest will drop off and she will disappear without notice into the downstairs bathroom for thirty minutes to urinate, pick at her face, put on makeup of some sort, and change out of her sleep clothes into something sexy and nightclub appropriate. She will emerge long enough to tell everyone goodbye, and then she will be in an Uber and off into the night to drink, dance, and make friends in the Northern Hemisphere while Kory sits alone on the living room floor, FOILing, watching  _ Family Feud _ , falling asleep on the rug, waiting for her mother to come home.

Jem will look at Mako once like this is his doing. Mako will offer up a razor-sharp, serrated-edge, “ _ What? _ ” and that will be the end of that.

Maybe it’ll be his fault. The guilt will stick to him like bug guts on a windshield, and he will be without wipers, without common sense enough to swipe himself clean.

On Thursday – almost a full week having been in New Orleans – Aroha will fall into a slumber of fairytale proportions. No one will see her at breakfast, and when 5:30 rolls around and Mako, Jem, and Kory have all come back home from work and ballet, respectively, there she will be in Mako’s bed, buried inches deep beneath winter covers and sleeping off the type of hangover brought upon by four nights of club-hopping and acid-tripping. Mako will cook the fifth vegetarian dinner in a row – spinach enchiladas with ricotta cheese and sour cream – and then, when Aroha doesn’t answer the phone after three times calling her, he will scale the stairs and put himself at his own bedside and shake Aroha until she comes felinely stretching herself awake, her blinking at him as if he is the most pleasant surprise at fucking 6:36 in the evening.

“Hello, my love,” she’ll yawn.

“What are you doing?” he’ll ask as if he is surprised and disbelieving, when the truth will be that part of him will be taking pleasure in having such a concrete reason to be pissed off with her. He will abruptly feel like his mother for this, and that will be terrifying. 

“Waking up,” Aroha will say, the  _ duh _ inaudible but clearly felt. She’ll sit up. Beneath the geologic layer of blankets, she’ll be wearing a sweater from Mako’s laundry. “What time is it?”

Mako will think about ripping his own head off. His mouth will hang open for a moment in dumb, manifest shock, and he will squint at the ceiling and say, “Wow, I can’t believe I forgot how actually, like, ridiculously retarded you are when it comes to giving a shit about other people.”

“What are you even talking about?” Aroha will ask, suddenly the same kind of hard-edged and diamantine as Mako. “If you’re pissed off about the sweater, I can buy you a new one or you can like, wash it.”

“I don’t care about my fucking sweater, Aroha!” Finding his voice uncomfortably loud, Mako will step back away from the bedside and put his hands on his chest. “Oh, wait, no. Actually I do care about the sweater. Why are you wearing my sweater?”

“I was cold.”

“The thermostat is set at seventy-two.”

“I turned it down to sixty. I don’t understand Fahrenheit – the numbers are so much bigger, it’s confusing.”

“Great! So I got pissed off at Mum for no fucking reason, and on top of that, my house is a refrigerator.” Mako will grasp wildly at both sides of his head, aware that this makes him look like an insane person. “Why are you doing this? Why have you spent the past four days like, partying and sleeping?”

Aroha will throw the covers off of herself and stand before Mako, wearing her underwear, looking thirteen years old. Her hands will invade him, brushing his sides and tickling him until he twists and recoils away from her, angrier than he even knows how to be. “I’m in New Orleans,” she will utter by way of excuse for maybe the fiftieth time ever, and in a dark, ugly way that Mako will refuse to contemplate or even acknowledge, he will want to hit her with a closed fist. Thinking nothing of it, Aroha will go downstairs in her half-dressed state and eat dinner with the family, and it will be a miracle of a borderline Biblical nature that Mum will not say anything – will instead just take her plate and roll out of the dining area, through the kitchen, and into her room. She will shut the door behind her. She’s become so much calmer since she found out she was dying.

The sun will begin to set on the Bywater and Aroha will want to take Kory on a walk. In the conspiratorial, profoundly childish way that has become commonplace over the course of the week, Kory will sneak into the kitchen while Mako is washing the dishes and ask, “Can you come with us?”

Mako will sigh. He will not be mad at Kory so much as he will despise the entire situation, Aroha, and himself. 

“Why?” 

“Because then it will be the three of us not talking instead of just me and Mum not talking.” Clearly trying to get on his good side, Kory will take the plate he’s just finished washing and rinse it under the scalding faucet, wincing at the water’s temperature that is too high for her, just right for him. “I promise I’ll do something for you if you come.”

“There’s literally nothing you could do for me that you don’t already do in some capacity because you have to or it’s in your nature,” Mako will say.

“I’ll make you something! Brownies! I found a post on Tumblr that tells you how to make cake mix taste homemade!”

“Kory, my darling.” Mako will drop his soapy utensils into the sink and channel his most elusive, calmest self. “You know you can do this without me, right? The whole point of your mum coming here was the two of you spending time together.”

“Really? I thought the whole point of her coming here was her sleeping all day and going out all night.”

Mako and Kory will exchange a long, mournful look, her a hothouse flower wilting, shriveling up into nothing. Aroha will pop into the kitchen and ask, “Are we going? We’re running out of sun!” and Kory will follow her mother out of the house with desire and obligation in the line of her shoulders. Mako will wonder who wants them to be mother and daughter the most – him, with all of his jealousy; Aroha, because of the quaintness of it all; or Kory, who’s cried over her mum for years – and whether it’s wanting at all or simply a matter of slapping the word “should” all over everything. He’ll see them all in that houseboat, drinking isopropyl alcohol and swabbing their wounds with gin. He’ll see him holding baby Kory in his arms as he always did, and Aroha never holding her at all.

Did she hate her daughter? More importantly, did she love her? When they moved into the bigger house in Poriura after Kory was born and Mako could never understand why Aroha wasn’t happy with the way things were, and he used his infant child as a shield against having uncomfortable conversations or staying up later than he wanted to or sometimes, so embarrassingly, even having sex with Aroha, and they went dancing and the energy was so different and when they came back home they got in the pool with each other, and Aroha was naked and Mako didn’t want her at all – and he’d always wanted her – and she looked at him and said, “You love that little girl more than you love me.”

He said, “That’s ridiculous.”

“It’s true, though,” Aroha said. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Mako knew she was yelling at him, but he couldn’t process the words as anything but blank, opaque blocks of sound of moderate volume and negligible weight. She was treading water near the middle of the pool while he sat at the shallow end, the water’s chlorinated surface kissing his chin, the blue-black night sky looming watchfully above. Kory hurtled through the world in his mother’s car in their direction, and he ached for her as he’d never ached for Aroha.

“What do you want from me?” he asked. “Can you hear what you’re saying? You’re talking about my child.”

“I’m your fiancée!” Aroha cried, thrashing about in the water.

“You’re acting like I don’t love you at all!” He flailed about in turn. “She’s  _ my child _ , Aroha! She’s your bloody child, too!”

“I never wanted her.” This, Aroha uttered quietly. She swam to him, into his arms and his lap, their nakedness pressed together in vibrant, illuminated blue. “I only had her for you.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“You’re fucking welcome.” She stepped out of the pool over his shoulder, padded wetly inside the house, and slammed the door behind her. It was the worst thing anyone had ever accused Mako of doing to them, and strangely enough, it coincided perfectly with his mother’s supposed forfeiture of her own life to his.

Maybe it was all, all of it, Mako’s fault.

Maybe this guilt could and would last forever. 

After the sky has gone dark and the number of dirty dishes in the house has dropped down to zero, Aroha and Kory will come back home. Aroha will take a forty-five minute shower and Kory will lie with her head in Mako’s lap for all of that time, unspeaking, sadder than he’s seen her in so long. When Aroha leaves for a night in the French Quarter with Karla the velvet teddy and her good friend Chaci, Mako will plant himself on her sofa, among her things, while Kory, Mum, and Jem all drift off to bed in that order, kissing his face as they go. He will watch  _ Frasier _ and poke through Aroha’s suitcase for hours – examining her knotted lime green earbuds, her plastic brush full of tangled strands of dark brown hair, her underwear with period stains and her underwear without them, an honest to God day planner featuring such notes as “7:00 dinner with Marj,” “5:35 flight to Paraguay,” “research shoe repair,” and “last day of antibiotics (yay!!!).”

At 3:29 AM, Aroha will let herself in with the keys Mako left in the flowerbed. Stinking of alcohol and sweat, she will stumble into the house, close the door, lean against it for a long moment of violated privacy that Mako will not allow himself to feel bad about, and then notice her ex sitting there in the dark, watching her like a crazed and suspicious lover in the movies. 

“Hey, baby,” she’ll drawl. Come staggering over on stiletto heels, plop herself down on the couch and throw her legs into Mako’s lap, dragging her toes across his chest. “You were waiting for me?”

Mako will look at her and say, “I need you to leave.”

Aroha, predictably, won’t hear him. She’ll lean into his space, put her face near his, and ask, “Why are you so serious? You look like you’re about to cry–”

“I need you to  _ leave _ , Aroha.” He’ll wait until her eyes focus on his and realization begins to bleed into her expression to continue speaking, to say, “I’m not kidding. I’m tired of this. I’m tired of trying to be fair to you.”

“Oh, boy,” she’ll breathe, leaning back against the arm of the sofa with an air of defeatism. “Here it comes. The lecture.”

“Okay, you might want to take this seriously? Because I am  _ done _ .  _ Finished _ . I’m not letting you come in here and do my fucking kid like this anymore. The jig is up. You’re banished.”

“What are you talking about, I’m ‘ _ banished _ ’?” Aroha will be laughing, even as Mako is none too gently shoving her legs out of his lap and standing up, even as he is staring her down with Ngata fire in his eyes. “What, I can’t see my own daughter anymore?”

“Yes, exactly. After fifteen years of mediocre parenting, you finally get exactly what you’ve wanted all along – an excuse to stop pretending like you care.”

“How dare you!” she’ll cry. “I  _ do _ care!”

“You care because I’m telling you no for once!” Mako will retort, and yes, he’ll be yelling at damn near the smallest hour of them all, and no, he won’t give a single shit. “You care because it’s part of the story you’ve been telling yourself for years, which has always said that you were so virtuous for having a baby and I was just the selfish, horrible man who inflicted her on you against your will!”

“Oh, get off your high fucking horse!” There Aroha will be, teetering to her feet to stand up to her six foot-tall ex and give back as good as she’s getting. “ _ You’re _ the virtuous one! Good for you, you poor, misunderstood little man who gave up his whole life to be a single dad! Why don’t we all just get on our knees and start sucking, huh?!”

“I wanted to give it up! I would give up  _ everything _ for her!”

“And that makes you so much better than me, doesn’t it?” Aroha says with a harsh, bitter laugh. “ _ Fuck _ me for wanting to have a life!  _ Fuck _ me for wanting to stay myself!”

“You could have  _ been  _ yourself and still been there for her if you gave a shit about anybody but you!”

“I will  _ not _ be told to stop loving myself!” Aroha’s hands will be on Mako’s chest, shoving him backward. “You won’t tell me to do that!”

“This is not! About! You!” In the heat of the moment, being pushed and prodded around himself, Mako will grab Aroha by her naked arms and shake her hard, will expel all of the air in his lungs into her face and yell, “This is about Kora! That’s the bloody point! You are  _ done _ with her…” He’ll release her into the shaky midnight air, half-drunk on the supremely negative energy of this entire interaction. “And I’m done with you.”

Aroha will stare up at him, wide-eyed like a little girl. Swallowing hard, she will ask him, “This isn’t just you punishing me, is it?”

Mako will raise his hands briefly and then let them drop limp against his thighs. “For what?”

“For leaving you,” will come the answer. Abruptly and unexpectedly – even, and especially, to himself – Mako will laugh like he did at The Willow and Aroha will look at him as if he’s shook her again.

“Leaving  _ me? _ ” Mako will ask. “I’m pretty sure that was a mutual decision, Aroha.”

It was. This, Mako refuses to forget. After the ultimate fight that bubbled up out of an overheard conversation between Aroha and Marjory – a conversation in which Aroha called herself “over Mako, over the kid, over everything” and laughed like this was the funniest thing in the world and not a tragedy of semi-Shakespearean proportions – they slept in the same bed for two weeks without touching, drifted around each other in the morning kitchen without speaking, and Mako took Kory with him everywhere he went while Aroha regressed to girlish adolescence just the way she’d been wanting to, the way she’d felt some kind of too guilty to with Mako and her two year old daughter present. She used to feel guilt, Mako will realize one day. Somewhere along the line, after the breakup and all the storytelling that followed it, the capacity just got burnt out of her. 

After not having spoken to or even having looked directly at him for a fortnight, Aroha came to Mako one night while he washed his face before bed and asked, “Are we ever going to talk again? Or will we be one of those middle-aged couples who lives together but doesn’t know anything about each other anymore?”

The words fell on Mako like red and orange leaves, and their answer welled up inside him with an almost nauseating upward force. “I don’t think we should be together anymore,” he said. Aroha sighed – a sound of resignation, not surprise.

“I knew you were going to say that,” she announced. She looked at his eyes in the bathroom mirror. “So what? You don't even wanna try?”

“Oh my God, Aroha...” Mako suddenly had the strength to look at her directly. “You don't know how badly I wanna try and fix this. But I know you, and I know me. Besides... you're the one who said you were tired of this.” He slipped by her out of the bathroom, in the direction of the house’s other, darker rooms. “Maybe I'm tired, too.”

The next day, he packed Kory up and took them to spend the night at his mother’s house, where the littlest one would toddle around the house until she got sleepy and Mako would drink red wine until he didn’t feel quite so scared and pissed off anymore, so pissed off he might have screamed and flew out of the window into the atmosphere to burn up, yes, screaming.

“Thank God you didn’t get married,” Mum said, pouring him bitter and bloody Shiraz. They were sitting at the table in the kitchen at 50 Salamanca Road; Mum’s hair cascaded down over her shoulders in loose, fat curls. “I swear, I could beat her arse black and blue.”

Mako, who’d been watching Kory roll around on the living room floor through the open doorway, whirled his head around to give his mother a deeply incredulous look. “You want to  _ beat her up? _ ”

“Yes, I do!” Mum declared, not far from slamming her fist down on the wooden tabletop for emphasis. “She broke my son’s heart!”

The truth of this refused to stick to Mako in the face of his mother’s righteous anger. He, suddenly kind of allergic to caring about himself, shook his head and muttered, “It’s not that big a deal, Mum…”

“The hell it isn’t!” Mum pointed at his face. “Don’t act like you didn’t just have tears in those big eyes.”

Mako, who could still feel the mortifying wetness on his face, rubbed at his eyes and croaked, “I’m always crying! Fuck!”

“Not like this, you’re not,” Mum retorted. She drank Shiraz straight from the bottle and watched him with the intensity of a lioness fixated on its prey, or, alternately, its suffering young. Mako just shook his head and started in on his second glass of wine.

“I can’t believe you want to beat her up.”

“You should have seen me when I was your age.” Mako allowed himself to imagine it – bell-bottomed Rui Ngata with her long sheep’s hair and her body the size and shape of a small bear’s, armed with brass knuckles and an expression of perpetual challenge. “You wouldn’t want to run into me in a dark alley.”

“Oh, I bet.”

Mum put the wine bottle down on the table with a dull  _ clunk _ , looked out of the window above the sink and said, “It would have been so beautiful, though.”

“What are you talking about now?” Mako asked.

“The wedding,” Mum replied. Mako allowed himself to imagine that, too.

He was lucky to have made the final break before some interminably floriated ceremony in Auckland attended by all of their friends and sinking itself like a nail into the coffin of his and Jem’s relationship. Lucky to have passed through the Weekend of Tears – him boxing up all of his and Kory’s worldly goods (because the custody battle would be practically nonexistent) to put into storage or send off to Jem’s house, deciding to give Aroha the bed and the sheets and the beautiful fucking ring he’d since paid off – before an exchange of infatuated vows and a honeymoon in Barbados, because Aroha liked the way the name sounded, Bar-bay-dos. How lucky he was to have recognized when he did his and Aroha’s ultimate incompatibility as parents and as people; another year and she’d have disappeared into his name and into loathing him more than she already did for making her a mother, and he’d have flung himself wholeheartedly into a life plagued by quietness and solitude of the sort that made his father so far away from everything and everyone. He’d have literally ceased to exist. How lucky he was, how lucky.

On Aroha’s last day in New Orleans, she will go to Kory before the girl has gotten dressed for school and tell her that she will never see or hear from her again, probably. It will be appalling, principally because Kory will not have the words with which to respond at all. Aroha will make no pretensions about this being for Kory’s own good or even regarding her own supposed emotional investment in the matter; she will simply say goodbye, go downstairs, and wait for Mako to finish brushing his teeth so that he can drive her to the airport.

Mako will put his head in Kory’s room before he leaves, will find her sitting on the edge of her bed in her sleep clothes still, staring blankly at the floor. 

“You don’t have to go to school today,” he’ll say. “I’ll be back in about an hour, okay?”

“Okay,” will come her near-inaudible reply. He’ll close the door and ask Jem to keep an eye on her. 

He will drive Aroha to the airport for an 8:45 flight to Los Angeles. Out of the Bywater and down I-10 they will slide, hindered by early morning traffic and bathing in the room-temperature pool of discomfort and anger that has sprung up beneath them. When they arrive at New Orleans International, the Jetta stuttering through a terminal swarming with cars like insects, Aroha will look at Mako after he’s parked on the curb and announce, “I don’t want to get out of the car.”

Mako will close his eyes. “Why?”

“Because then I’m never going to see you again,” she’ll say. “I’m fucking furious with you, but I don’t want that. I don’t want never to see you again.”

“I don’t want that either.”

Aroha will scoff. “Stellar way of showing it.” She will fiddle briefly with the straps of the purse in her lap, dark circles hanging faintly beneath her eyes, the sexiness of the night before having worn off with the time elapsed and the trauma of being yelled at. “It’s all my fault, isn’t it?” she’ll ask.

Mako, finally, will look at her and find her the most pathetic, the most pitiable she has ever been where he could see her. “Not all your fault,” he’ll say. “Some of your fault. Most of your fault.”

Aroha will wear a smile with the visual taste of licorice. She will say nothing, just stare out the window at all the busy people milling about the terminal, going everywhere they need to be, everywhere that isn’t New Orleans. 

For what is ten minutes but feels more like thirty, Mako and Aroha will sit in silence and enjoy togetherness that has become critically endangered, on the verge of going entirely extinct. Maybe when he is older, Mako will think, he will regret cutting Aroha out of his and his daughter’s life like a diseased branch on an otherwise healthy tree; maybe he will miss her, and the missing will not be evidence of his inability to let go of anything that’s ever happened to him. When their lingering grows excessive, Mako will help pull Aroha’s suitcase out of the Jetta’s trunk and roll it onto the gray, smoothish curb, and Aroha will shock the shit out of him by pulling him into her arms and holding him close for all of fifteen seconds, her hands in his hair and on his neck, invading him.

She was the love of his life.

She will kiss the corner of his mouth, pick up her things, and head into the terminal without looking back.

Mako will drive home and cry, to his faint surprise, not a single tear. When he opens the front door, the whole house will sigh with relief at its release from the frenzied, profoundly anxious state Aroha’s presence had it bound up in. Mum will be eating bacon in her wheelchair at the dining table and Jem will be putting the blankets from the couch into the downstairs laundry hamper, him whistling to himself, tapping out an upbeat drum solo against his thighs. Untouched by this scene of blatant happiness, Mako will go directly up the stairs and into Kory’s room, and predictably, Kory will be there crying softly and shaped like her fetal self in the center of her bed.

Mako will go to her bedside, crawl up right behind her to wrap his whole body around hers and kiss the spots on her head that used to be soft when she was a baby. 

“I hate her,” Kory will say wetly, nasally, small in his arms and with her hair everywhere. “I mean, I don’t hate her… but I wish I did. I wish I never knew her.”

“That’s fair,” Mako will reply.

Kory will turn halfway around in his grasp to look at him and ask, “Do you hate her, too?”

Brushing her face with the tips of his fingers, Mako will say, “The answer to that question is far too complicated for this sad Friday morning, my love.” He’ll smile. “I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

This, for some reason, will not tug the corners of Kory’s lips downward and pull the tears faster out of her eyes. Instead, it will put a strangely hopeful look on her face, and she, the saving grace of Mako’s entire life, will ask him, “My next birthday present, maybe?”

Their pinkies will hook together. Mako will kiss the place just beneath Kory’s left eye and say, “Anything to make the shopping easier.”

All of this will come to pass, and it will be as though the wholesome family breakfast on this fine May morning never happened at all.

#    
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if this book gets published and garners an actual fandom, i want someone on tumblr to have the url 'jemskindle' because let's face it, jem's kindle is a minor character. it's appeared more times than alyssa, than his fucking _mom_ , even.


	21. 21

#  _ 21 _

It has been said that therapy is for the self-indulgent. This is an opinion Mako generally believes to have come out of a society that derides psychological health as an unattractively feminine or, alternately, literally fantastical subject to be concerned about. Long gone are the days during which he cloistered himself shamefully in this particular school of thought, badgering himself not for the deficits afforded to him by his mental illness – or, for that matter, the sheer thing of having a mental illness itself – but for needing help to cope with said mental illness, for being so woefully lacking in self-awareness that he needed someone to tell him about himself on a biweekly basis in order to stay sane. Even having left this shame behind, however, he still has his moments in which the practice of therapy becomes so unbearably about him and him alone that he cannot help but feel vaguely mortified about the entire experience; on the fourth Thursday in May, he experiences one of these such moments.

He is talking about his mother. Her anger, her traumatic lack of sentimentality, her utter audacity to die. Suddenly, mid-sentence, he is caught fly-like in the abstract art print above China’s head, and without warning he is sitting with his eyes open and his mouth closed, so goddamn sick of himself it is hard to fathom. 

China watches him with an expression of even confusion. “What’s the matter?”

Mako shakes his head. “I’m so fucked up. I’m like, the most fucked up there ever was.”

“That’s statistically impossible.”

“Yeah?” He releases a soft, bitter sort of laugh. “My mom is literally falling apart and all I can talk about is how it’s affecting me. How like, awful she is for leaving me even though I literally hate her. What the hell is wrong with me?”

“I don’t know if I’ve told you this before,” China says. “But this is possibly the one place and time in which you get to be as uncompromisingly selfish as you want. I have no doubt that your mother’s illness is important to you for more reasons than those that directly affect you. Am I right?”

Mako glares down into his lap. “Yeah.”

“Of course I am.” China giggles. “But right now we’re talking about you, and you know what? That’s okay. That’s what we’re here for.”

“What if I don’t want to talk about me, though?” Mako asks. “What if I don’t want to talk about how, like, I can only experience my relationship with my mum on my own terms? What if I want to experience it on  _ her _ terms? What if I did that and hated myself even more than I already do because she probably hates me, too?”

“She doesn’t hate you.”

“You don’t know that.” Mako rubs his face. “You only know her through me and all I do is complain about her.”

“Also false!” China chirps. “You’ve spoken positively about her many times.”

“Thanks, China.”

“You’re welcome.” China wears a knowing, Delphic smile. “If we’re talking about things that are statistically impossible, your mother hating you is one of them. What is infinitely more likely is that a whole series of other factors are at play, among them a differing love style from yours and her frustration with a lifestyle that has never suited her.”

“Are you talking about parenting me?”

“Basically, yes.”

Mako frowns at his palms, then at China. “Are you saying that she’s justified in treating me like shit?”

“Yes.” China raises a calm, defensive hand. “Mind you, there’s a difference between justification and excuse. I don’t think there’s ever a particularly good excuse for abuse.”

Mako sighs, looks out of the window at the wall of hanging vines and clinging moss directly outside. The love he feels for his mother in this moment is crippling and absolutely atrocious, and he has lived with it for so long that, like a cancer, it has insinuated itself so intricately within his internal architecture – metastasized from his brain to his skeletal, digestive, and endocrine systems – that its removal has become patently impossible, possibly even fatal if attempted. 

“I just wish she weren’t dying so I didn’t have to feel sorry for her,” he says. “So I didn’t have to feel like, like I just adore and owe her so much. I didn’t have to think about loving or being obligated to her before, when she was okay. It was so much easier to just act like I didn’t care at all because I was hurt and vindicated.”

China observes him with her typical look of perpetual, unconditional calm and affection on her face. “Was it healthy, though?” she asks. “Acting like you didn’t care?”

Mako turns back to her, shaken briefly to his core. “No.”

He goes back to work.

Annie is watching a predictably incisive documentary about the food industry when Mako reenters his office at 3:25 PM, sitting at her desk with her chicken legs pulled up onto her chair and a ceramic bowl full of ramen propped up on her knees. She looks up upon his entrance and immediately puts on her smile of welcome, reaching for her laptop to turn down the volume of  _ Food: The Friendliest Force in the World _ .

“How’d it go?”

Mako shrugs, ambling over to his desk and kicking his sandals off beneath it. “I didn’t cry,” he says.

“Is that a good thing?”

“Well, you know, if you subscribe to the school of thought that associates tears with emotional catharsis, then I guess no, it isn’t a good thing.” Mako drops himself heavily into his chair, stretches his whole body, and relishes the soft  _ pops _ of his vertebrae, kneecaps, and elbows. “Then again, I cry about something at least once a week, and it’s usually not therapy. It’s something stupid like… like I was scrambling my egg too vigorously and some of it spilled on the floor.”

Annie snorts. “Mood.”

“Big mood.” Immediately after saying this, Mako groans. “I hated that meme, that’s so 2018.”

Slurping long ramen noodles into her mouth, Annie makes a  _ hmm _ ing sound of acknowledgment. “I finished editing your piece.”

“Yeah, I got the email notification while I was driving back.”

“Time to sit around and do nothing at work for the next week or so.”

“Oh, you’re forgetting about picture day,” Mako says, sitting up and giving Annie a pointed stare from his side of the room. Her eyes appear over the top of her laptop, and he gives her a wry, somewhat sarcastic smile. “What are you going to wear?”

“A Marie Antoinette dress.”

“Yum- _ my _ !” Mako exclaims. “I was going to put on my grass skirt and do the hula.”

Annie’s brows furrow beneath her deeply adorable pixie cut. “I thought that was Hawaiian.”

“All Polynesian cultures are the same, Annie. If they’re brown, they luau.” Mako waits for the beat thick with uncertainty and white guilt to pass before adding, “I’m kidding.”

Annie releases a gale force sigh that tickles Mako so much he legit giggles. “I was hoping you were. I can never tell when you’re joking.”

“For real, though, Maoris, Hawaiians, Samoans, and Tahitians are basically all branches of the same cultural-linguistic tree,” Mako says. “If I wanted to hula for picture day, it would only be slightly fucked up and inappropriate.” He’s about to elaborate on the potential ramifications of such an act when his left ass cheek begins to vibrate insistently. “Who the hell is calling me?” he asks nobody in particular, pulling his phone out of his back pocket and making quick work of inspecting the caller ID. He answers.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in class right now?” he asks without saying hello.

Jem’s voice comes over the line clear and not even a little irritated. “I let my first batch of kids out early,” he says. “What’s up with you, pretty man? Are you through with China?”

“Yeah, I just got back to work.” Mako is smiling and he doesn’t know why. “What’s up? What do you want?”

“Oh!” Jem breaks off into soft, somewhat breathless laughter. “I literally got so excited just hearing your voice I forgot all about what I was calling you for.”

“I’m flattered.” When this comes out flatter and drier than he intends for it to: “I really am, even if I don’t sound like it. You know I have my medical condition – chronic bitch-sounding-voice-itis.”

“Oh, come on, writer. I think we can do better than that. You’ve got Latin and French roots at your disposal. Etymologies and orthographies.”

“ _ Wow _ , okay, dragging me on Therapy Thursday, the day during which I’m at my most emotionally fragile and when all I need is your tender loving care–”

“You’re so annoying! Why do I even care about you!”

“I feel like our relationship can only be explained in terms of the curse an ancient djinn put on your family,” Mako says. “You were destined to meet me and endure endless suffering in your life. Snakes manifest in your home daily. Blood pours from your faucets in lieu of water. You can’t sleep or eat and it’s all because of me.”

By now, Jem is laughing his spluttering, wheezy, machine gunesque, high-as-a-female-falsetto-if-not-higher laugh, and into his office’s cool conditioned air Mako is releasing a laugh of his own, ignorant for the moment of the way Annie is watching him over her ramen with a profoundly loving, almost covetous look on her face.

“Chronic vox deformitate,” Mako says, Google Translate pulled up on his work computer.

“That’s better,” Jem purrs, and Mako, feeling bitchy, hangs up on him. Five seconds later, he sends Jem a text message that’s just row after row of hearts. 

Before the work day is up, tragedy strikes. At 4:15, the writers are having an end of the month dance party in the hallway in front of Jerri’s office, getting down to the smooth Al Green rhythms booming through the workplace and sipping on the too-sweet lemonade brought to the office in one of Monica’s great yellow pitchers. David, in his desperate attempt to wheel his way past the congregation and get to the men’s bathroom at the end of the hall, rolls over Eryka’s left foot – yanking out of her a more than voluble “Shit!” that just about anyone in the office with a working pair of ears hears – knocks Tony and Stanley into the wall – and here we are gifted with additional curses delivered at the top of the lungs – and ultimately does not make it to the toilet in time – a fact that everyone becomes aware of when the unmistakable stench of shit fills the hallway.

Over the clamor of soul music and confused conversation, here comes Jerri’s voice calling: “Did someone just shit in the hallway?!”

Then there is Summer, speaking just as loudly: “Oh my  _ God _ , someone shit in the hallway!”

There is Tony, asking as if attempting to be heard by the patrons of the seafood restaurant down the street: “Who shit in the hallway?! Is it on the floor?!”

Mako looks at the door, then at Annie. “I think someone shit in the hallway.”

“Wow, you think?” Annie cups a hand like a surgical mask over her face. “Oh man, I can smell it.”

Mako gets up to stick his head very briefly out into the hallway. There are the writers, scrambling around in front of Jerri’s office with a cartoonish Hanna-Barbera agitation to their movements, and there is David, sitting dejected about a yard away and yelling, “Goddammit!” while emanating strongly fecal smells. Mako, who has not quite yet displayed the true depths of his depravity today, quietly closes his office door, runs into the far right corner of the room, and bursts into horrible, repulsive laughter, hiding his face in his hands and just letting it rip where David (hopefully) cannot hear him.

Annie looks at him with an expression of open questioning. “What’s so funny? What happened?”

Between short fits of giggles that make his life so difficult, Mako returns Annie’s gaze and replies, “It was David.”

Annie’s jaw literally drops. “Oh,  _ no _ .”

Mako puts his face into the juncture of the room’s right and back walls. “Oh, yes.”

“That’s wrong, Mako,” Annie says, almost whining. “Don’t laugh at him! He’s paraplegic!”

“I know, I know, I just–”

Through the door, Mako can hear Monica and Paul fussing over David, both offering to roll him out to his car. 

“Here, let me get the door,” Monica is saying.

“I fucking  _ shit _ myself, my hands didn’t break!” David snaps. Mako howls.

“You’re wrong for that.” Annie is shaking her head even as she fans a hand in front of her face, her expression warped with olfactory disgust. “You’re so fucked up. You’re going straight to Hell for that.”

Gasping for air, Mako cries, “That’s what I’ve been saying! And nobody believes me!”

The next day, there is a new sign posted in the hallway.

#    
  


**NO MORE THAN THREE PEOPLE  
** **IN THE HALL AT ONE TIME!**

_ Thanks,  
_ _ MGMT _

#    
  


Picture day is, as expected, slightly if not flagrantly rip-roaring. Despite how niggardly Priya has often shown herself to be in the past (not to mention the fact that at least two people on staff, Mako among them, are actual professional photographers), she brings in two operatives from GeauX Shoots in Metairie to take both candid and formal portrait snapshots of each editor and editorial assistant. Annie does not arrive, as she said she would, in Rococo fashion; instead, she shows up looking like Strawberry Shortcake in pink overalls and a red newsboy cap, threatening the expulsion of Mako’s heart directly from his floriated chest – a fact that he takes great care not to express at all. Paul comes in in a two-piece suit, clearly having interpreted the occasion as being a formal one. Kelsey goes the opposite route and comes in wearing an Astros jersey beneath which the scars from his top surgery are quite visible, comment on this as everyone might not. Jackson looks like Christmas in a sequined blazer and sparkling eyeliner that pops on his dark lids. Wanda, his editorial assistant, is lightyears more conservative in a little black dress and littler black pumps. Naomi is loud. Dressed head-to-toe in yellow florals and wearing a culturally inappropriate headscarf, she looks as though, as Jerri so aptly says, “the Chiquita Banana lady threw up on her.” She brings with her a white cake with thick buttercream frosting and a white girl named Deborah, her second oldest daughter sent home from school for the misbehavior of getting sick. David dresses in brown pants. Jackie wears a vaguely wrinkled button-down that matches the pale, unassuming blue of his office’s undecorated walls. Jerri and Priya take the opportunity of the event to duel with their wardrobes, to dress in form-fitting, busily-patterned dresses and roachkiller pointed-toe shoes and call each other “looking on the heavy side” and “dressing for an age long past.” This, of course, is pure, soap operatic fun for the bystanders and nothing short of disastrous for the editor in chief’s mood, as she is later found crying in the bathroom by Annie, wiping mascara tracks from beneath her eyes and muttering, “Fuck this. Fuck everything.” 

Before the photographers show up with their tripods and their adult acne, Naomi and Flora cut the cake into little square pieces to dish out to everyone present.

While getting her portion, Deborah produces a brief, hacking cough directly over the lovely buttercream flowers. 

The sickly green shockwave is instantaneous, rocking through the entire office with a sort of cinematic gravitas. 

Mako shrugs and eats his piece anyway, shoveling the pale frosted sponge into his mouth without the use of anything but his fingers. “My immune system will just get a little workout in,” he says, reaching for Annie’s cake. “Are you gonna eat that?”

Annie, in all her faintly disgusted adorableness, hands her paper plate right over. “You can have it.” 

By Monday, Mako has an upper respiratory tract infection that is nosediving fast into laryngitis. He comes to work in sweatpants and one of Kory’s rainbow elastic headbands, having already used most of his vacation days of the quarter on depressive mornings spent low to the ground and wrapped around Jem in bed, crying about his mother or the various parts of his life in her vicinity, sleeping off his melancholy while the rest of the world toils away, the faultiest cog in  _ Endymion _ ’s half-broken Frankenstein machine. It is sometimes a wonder that he still has the same job after nine years of this bullshit, nine years of coping and only barely making it out with his head above water.

Over the weekend, Priya’s runny makeup heartbreak toward Jerri has metamorphosed into righteous rage that is vaguely oriented around the magazine going to print this coming Friday. She stalks through the office at the height of Monday morning, commenting snidely on Mako’s sweats even as she compliments them (“Cute Aztec pattern, my man, but I don’t think that’s exactly work appropriate!”), crying out about the vandalization of her capacity limit sign (“If you’re going to draw a cock and balls,  _ Tony _ ,  _ Stanley _ , or  _ Kiev _ , at least draw them anatomically correctly! We do have women and queers in this office who are more than happy to give you input!”), screeching commands at Monica just outside the woman’s office as if she’s some kind of slave instead of the high and mighty managing editor (“Make me some coffee, Monica! Miss Sally’s out today and I feel like my  _ head _ is just going to fucking explode! No cream and lots of sugar! And I better have that fucking schedule for next month on my desk within the next hour, otherwise I can’t be held responsible for the acts of terror I will enact upon this office!  _ God _ , I need a fucking assistant!”), a Desi Faye Dunaway rampaging out of the unadulterated love and fear in her big, fat, bleeding heart. 

Mako has to sympathize, even with someone who has so clearly sold her soul to the devil (or some comparable spirit of corporate success/personal misery). Long has he looked at Priya and seen shadows of Rui Ngata in her, has he speculated about her membership in the same tragic bipolar tribe to which he and his mother belong. Many times, sitting in his office with the door open and idly listening to her rampage through the workplace, he has wanted to come to her with a soft face and a wry smile and ask her – not as a subordinate, but as someone who gets it – “Do you want to talk about it? The steaming, writhing mess inside your brain?” but rather than perform this act of bravery and kindness, he always chooses to sublimate his urges into getting Annie water with lemon or reorganizing all the inane gifts donated to his desktop by Jem via the Target bargain bin, into scratching his head until it feels as though he has eroded a hole through to his skull, into going home and making something really involved for dinner.

Today, he listens to Paul, Stanley, and Kiev talk in the kitchen about their bathroom habits.

“When I go, I take all my clothes off.”

“What are you talking about, man?”

“I’m talking about the fact that I take all my clothes off. Germs. The germs. They’ll hop on my clothes if I’m wearing them.”

“What, like little ninjas?”

“Little ninjas, that’s a good one.”

“Me, I get bored. It takes me a long time to get the motor running. You know those Escape the Room games?”

“The what games?”

“Escape the Room games. They put you in a little room full of a bunch of clues and objects and shit, and you solve puzzles that lead to other puzzles that lead to other puzzles–”

“That sounds very confusing.”

“Yeah, Kiev, that sounds very confusing.”

“It’s not confusing, you just don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“Are you talking about hidden object games?”

“No, I’m talking about Escape the Room games. You solve puzzles to find a key to the door, and then you go in the door, and then there’s another room full of more puzzles, and so on. Look it up on Wikipedia.”

“Why are we talking about this?”

“I was going to say that I play Escape the Room games while I’m waiting, you know. Because I get bored.”

“Have you tried MiraLAX?”

“I can’t afford that. I’m a contract worker.”

“MiraLAX is over the counter, dude. It’s like seven bucks at CVS.”

“Seven bucks is my lunch!”

“Maybe you should have dinner with me and the family sometimes. I’ll get you some MiraLAX. My wife makes some mean red beans and rice.”

“Yeah, then I’ll  _ really _ need that fucking MiraLAX.”

“If I hear the word MiraLAX one more time,” Mako says at a moderate, croaking volume that does not approximate secretiveness and yet, due to his budding laryngitis, is too soft to be heard by anyone outside of the room. Annie gives him a piteous look from her desk, then devolves into a barrage of wheezing coughs.

“I take an hour and a half every day,” Paul is saying amidst the background  _ clip-clop _ of heels against hardwood. “Usually in the morning. Better to get it over with early, am I right?”

Suddenly, Priya’s soprano voice jumps out among the baritone chorus. “What are you talking about?”

“MiraLAX!” Mako rasps as loudly as he can. Annie vehemently shushes him – for no reason, it turns out, because nobody hears him but her. 

“You’re telling me you’ve been standing out here for the past ten minutes talking about your bowel movements?” Priya asks, thereby launching into the rant of the whole fucking century (or the week, same difference). “You’re telling me that every time you need to shit, you post up in the fucking bathroom because you need to get comfortable?! In order to take a shit you need to sit down and wait?! Why not just drink some fucking coffee like a normal fucking person and then get your ass to the bathroom and get that shit done?! When you’re taking a shit, that’s the time to get in and get out! I’m listening to you fucks sitting in the fucking bathroom for like thirty minutes taking a shit and playing on your phones and I’m like what the fuck is wrong with you?! You’re shitting and using your phone in an environment that’s full of bacteria and germs, and then later you put that same phone in your fucking ear! You might as well just shit on your fucking phone!”

“That’s what I’m saying, boss,” Stanley puts in.

“Don’t fucking interrupt me!” Priya snaps. “What’s worse is that all of you are having the grandest old time discussing this when we go out to the printers in four! Fucking! Days! Do you think I’m having fun in my office listening to this bull?! Do you think everyone else in their offices are just sitting around, twiddling their thumbs?!”

“I’ve watched like three episodes of  _ Chef’s Table _ today,” Mako says to Annie.

“She’s gonna hear you,” Annie hisses. 

Mako raises his hands to shoulder-level. “So what?”

From her office comes Jerri’s voice: “Oh, there goes Old Yeller.”

“Don’t you fucking start, Jer!” Priya cries. 

“What did I say?!” There is Jerri, suddenly in the hallway in her chinos and an amber mood ring. “I was making a joke!”

“I can’t believe I work here,” Mako announces, going to close the door. As he passes briefly into the doorway, he catches a glimpse of Priya’s taut, infuriated face and imagines that her lips are tight enough to shoot a diamond right out of her mouth and into his forehead, effectively lobotomizing him. The pleasantness of this fantasy being fairly maximal, he listens to the click of the latch, stands very still, and succumbs to a coughing fit so violent that he nearly blacks out for a moment. When he comes to, Annie is there, snuffling wetly.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

He puts a hand ever so briefly on her face. “I’m perfectly fine, my dear,” is his answering squawk.

At home, there is nothing in the way of analgesics but children’s Tylenol and Mum’s industrial strength painkillers in the medicine cabinets. Mako lies on the sofa under a thin, woven blanket, sore-throated and runny-nosed, and listens to the sounds of the house – Jem on the phone with the deliveryman from Happy Wok, directing him through their frankly quite uncomplicated neighborhood; Kory blasting her music upstairs, “ _ She got gold doorknobs where her eyes used to be _ ,” loud enough to perhaps call for an annoyed voicemail from their right-side neighbor; Mum in her wheelchair front of  _ Jeopardy! _ on Hulu, adjusting herself on her orthopedic doughnut and calling out answers: “What is an embolism? What is ambidextrous? You heard that, Mako? They’re talking about you on TV.” Closing his eyes, he does not see but feels Jem’s approach from behind, feels the man’s lips on his forehead and hand feathering over his chest, the lifting of his legs so that Jem can sit with them stretched across his lap.

“Why did I just do that?” Jem asks, and Mako cracks an eye open to peer at his faintly annoyed expression. “I’m going to have to get up in like two seconds anyway to answer the door.”

“Get the kid to do it,” Mako utters with a voice that has nearly become nonexistent. He tries to yell, “Kory!” but all that comes out are faltering, pathetic little strains of sound that can only be heard by Jem and Mum. He whines a little. “Please call her.”

“Kory!” Jem hollers. Twenty-three seconds, and then the girl’s door is coming open and the young lady herself is standing at the top of the stairs, barefoot and in her shorts from gym class.

“What?!”

“Come downstairs and answer the door for me when the Chinese guy comes!”

“Why?!”

“Because I’m taking care of your daddy and I said so!”

“You’re not taking care of me,” Mako observes. Jem takes his hand and brings it up to a puckered, kissing mouth.

“Shush,” he says, then gives Mako a sideways look. “You don’t consider comfort care?”

Mako simply releases a low, pained noise. “Everything sucks. I ought to send Naomi like, the most pissed off, ugly email ever for infecting me with Covid-19 with her foreign rugrat.”

“I thought you liked Naomi,” Jem says. “I thought she was one of the more tolerable ones.”

“I don’t like anyone I work with,” Mako lies, and the untruth comes primarily out of his acute sense of physical unhappiness, out of his respiratory discomfort and his dissatisfaction with the thing of having to have a traditional job at all. “They’re all awful. They’re either nosy or they’re inconsiderate or like, normcore as hell, or they’re just crazy and rude, or they literally stand in the hallway and talk about their constipation, which I’m like, cool, I always wanted to know that about you, dude.”

Jem is making the loving, marginally judgmental face he makes when Mako is being some kind of ridiculous (which, to be fair, happens at least once a day). “I think you’re being kind of mean,” he says.

“Stranger things have happened.”

“I mean, who are you to call someone normcore when you’re basically subscribing to the same late capitalist lifestyle you’re presumably criticizing? We shop at Wal-Mart and Whole Foods. You get drunk at least once a week. You own this house. You play Words with Friends with your friends.”

“Okay, but I read a lot of Marx in university and also smoke weed and take it up the ass so that has to count for something.”

“Hey, hey,  _ hey _ , hey!” Mum interjects, waving her hands around in the air. “I don’t need to know about what my son does and doesn’t have in his rectum.”

“You are also, in fact, crazy,” Jem remarks. “That is, if you equate the use of psychotropic drugs with craziness.”

“Is that not the literal definition of craziness?” Mako croaks.

“Semantics.” Jem gives his head a little shake. “And don’t try to act like you don’t have your moments of complete inappropriateness. Every time we go shopping for condoms it’s like a game of How Many Straight People Can We Offend Today.”

“Yeah, but that’s fun,” Mako giggles. 

Jem’s phone begins to ring in his pocket. Sighing, Jem retrieves the device and says, “You don’t hate everyone you work with. You love them. You love Annie.”

“Oh, yeah…” Mako says, staring wistfully at the ceiling as Jem answers his phone, calls Kory downstairs, and directs her to his wallet and the credit card within it. In his sickly pessimism, he’d forgotten all about Annie and – this having been pointed out to him – now feels as though he’s committed some grievous wrong against her person, against their relationship, though the wrong may be apparent only to him.

Tonight, Jem feeds him egg drop soup and helps him into the steaming bathtub as if he is an invalid and not simply suffering with a moderately distressing bacterial infection. In bed, he reads clues from the daily  _ Washington Post _ crossword puzzle out loud to him as if they are lines from a collaborative poem, and Mako hoarsely answers them with his own contributions – “Styx. Woody. Yahoo.” Jem does not hesitate to kiss his mouth, to pull him into his arms and hold his aching body to his despite Mako’s blatant contagiousness, the grossness of runny mucus coming out of his nose, his meanness, and his regular use of psychotropic medication. Mako doesn’t know where this kind of love came from; he does not think he’ll ever stop wondering at it, being surprised by its endurance even as it becomes a progressively more boring aspect of his normcore life.

Tuesday passes through a headachey haze of remorse and regret. At ten o’clock, Priya calls an impromptu office meeting and, with her owl-eyed Chanel sunglasses on and an opaque thermos lingering near the edge of her desk, formally apologizes for her Kīlauea-style blowup yesterday. Everyone retains their jobs and the workplace slogs onward towards printers’ day, the editors editing and the writers writing. When noon rolls around and Mako feels the desire to go home most acutely, he takes several moments to decompress his skull in the bathroom (wasting half a roll of toilet paper while he’s at it) and then asks Annie to walk with him to get coffee and ice cream three blocks down – “I’ll pay,” he says. “My treat.”

Blowing her nose into a paper towel from the kitchen, Annie accepts with a soft, creaky, “Alrighty.” She grabs her wallet from her tote, checks her hair in the faint reflection afforded by her MacBook’s monitor, and then they take a walk together through the Central Business District, telling no one and closing and locking their office door before they go.

Annie walks through the world with a sort of fascinated wonder about her that reminds Mako of Kory when she was smaller, when they’d first moved to New Orleans and every sight and sound as they walked down the street captivated her almost to the point of overwhelming her. Mako tells Annie this, and she, sucking mucus upward through her nose, gives him a kind of sheepish smile with only one side of her mouth.

“This is going to sound really random, but I used to think I was going to become a nun,” she says.

“A  _ nun?! _ ”

“Yeah, a nun.” As they pass maybe the sixth lamppost decorated with neon pink flyers for some rave night at a bar in the Lower Garden District, the self-conscious quality of Annie’s smile deepens. “All Catholic girls think about becoming nuns at some point in their lives, and I, for one, was going to become a cloistered one. The world just scared me that much.”

Mako’s brow furrows; he looks at Annie curiously. “But you love it.”

Annie looks back, suddenly very soft around the edges. “I know. That’s why I said it; what you said made me think of the whole nun thing.”

Mako and Annie turn right from Magazine Street onto Girod. Without thinking, Mako reaches over and lets his right pinkie curl around Annie’s left; she gives him a look of quiet astonishment, yet says nothing and does not pull away.

“I get it,” he says, producing a strangled, hacking cough that he stifles in the inside of his left elbow. “I think about disappearing out of the world all the time. I used to live in the country when I was growing up – like, three hours away from anything urban, anything resembling modern civilization – so I think I’ve just been molded into a person who loves, like, slowness and stillness and stability even though everything about me is just, so, so not that.”

“I was about to say!” Annie cries with a laugh. “You’re like, insane.”

“I know! I think that’s why I liked the country so much, though. It was calm where I wasn’t. It grounded me and reminded me to like, stop rolling around all over the place and screaming and crying and being a crazy fucking person long enough to appreciate the sky. Or what it felt like to wait for a cake to come out of the oven with nothing to entertain me but a book or the goats and sheep. Or having to go to sleep in complete, penetrating silence, which I have no idea how to do anymore since I’ve lived in a city for I think over half of my life now.” Mako sighs into the hot, damp air of late May. “I miss it a lot. I felt like I had so much less to pay attention to there.”

“And that’s a good thing?”

“Yeah, I’m like, crazy having so many things to attend to.”

“But you’d have those things to attend to anyway,” Annie says. “I think what you’re wanting to go back to is  _ childhood _ , not necessarily, what… rural seclusion?”

“No, but like, think about it. I wouldn’t have to go to work because I’d just live off of my land, and I could mindlessly conk out in front of the television if I ever wanted just that little toxic taste of modernity, and there wouldn’t be as many people just thoughtlessly weaving in and out of my life every time I went to get a drink or walked down the street or went clothes shopping or whatever. I wouldn’t have to see or talk to anyone but my family. I wouldn’t have three grillion people trying to contact me at all times. If I needed to take a rest I could just do that. It would be perfect.”

“But isn’t what you’re describing trying to get away from just… life?” Annie asks.

“Yes! Exactly! You figured it out. What I really want to do is die.”

Annie looks at him slack-jawed. She has never quite tolerated his negativity – this much she makes apparent when she literally announces, “I don’t accept this! You don’t want to run away from your life because your life is your life! It’s yours! It’s full of people that you love and yes, annoyances and bills and politics and freaking… Paul and Kiev talking about their constipation where everyone in the world can hear them, but you’re in love and you have a daughter and you go out and get drunk sometimes and isn’t that what it’s all about? Why wouldn’t you want that?”

Mako stares ahead of him, seeing nothing, blinded by thoughtfulness and anchored to the ground only via the tether of Annie’s pinkie finger. 

“Besides.” Annie coughs. “You have people that would miss you if you went away.”

At this, Mako looks and gets the side of Annie’s head, her stubborn profile, her refusing to turn and hold his gaze. He is brought back to the previous day, when he forgot all about her existence entirely, and his head aches with both his congestion and his guilt, the weight of his brain matter and the weight of his adoration for her. He turns their pinkies’ embrace into one of all ten of their fingers. “Thanks, Annie,” he says.

Annie shakes her head. “No problem, boss.”

At this acknowledgment of his formal superiority over her, Mako uses his hand holding hers to reach over and pinch her side, reprimanding. Annie returns the favor and gets the soft flesh of his right cheek, and then they are laughing and coughing their way down the street, laughing and coughing their way into the combination coffeehouse/ice cream parlor. Mako buys Annie vanilla bean ice cream topped with pistachios and a stroopwafel cookie and she buys him an affogato shake, dropping two bucks into the tip jar. They take their time walking back to the  _ Endymion _ office, their work for the month essentially already over and done with.

The next day, Priya calls a surprise office meeting for the second time in just as many days. This time, she is not drunk or hungover, but wears an expression of intense solemnity as she stands in front of her desk, waiting for all of her employees to finish filing into her office and finding places where which to briefly touch down. Clearing her throat so as to usher in quiet, she finds the first person her eyes happen to land on – Mako – and focuses on him as she declares to the room, “Paul died this morning.”

A soundless beat passes. Into the drowsy, early morning quiet of the office, Kelsey pronounces a shocked, “What?”

“His wife… called me this morning.” Priya, who has never shown a particular surplus of care for anyone she works with save for in the instances of their demonstrated editorial excellence, appears wet-eyed and defeated as she speaks. “It was an accident. I won’t go into the details. The funeral is tomorrow morning, and I’m not closing the office, but feel free to take the day off. I expect to see everyone on Friday when we go to the printers.”

“How did he die?” Stanley interjects amidst the bewildered murmurs of the remainder of the office staff. Some of her customary, hard-edged irritation pierces through the tragic hull of Priya’s melancholy.

“That’s really none of your business.”

“I kind of feel like it is, though,” Kiev puts in with his typical pigheadedness. “I mean, some of us have been working with Paul for ten years.”

Surprising no one, Jerri concurs with a vehement, “Exactly.” Putting her hands to her chest in a deeply overwrought expression of her own ridiculous self-absorption, she says, “I feel like all of us would have a deeper sense of closure if only we just knew how he went out of this world–”

“He had a heart attack!” Priya blurts out, pissy. “On the toilet! Okay? He had a heart attack on the toilet. Are we all sufficiently secondhand embarrassed?”

One could hear a pin drop in the silence that follows. Rather than feeling as he felt on the day David soiled himself – as though he’s going to start laughing and never ever stop – Mako feels profoundly guilty for ever disliking Paul as much as he did when the man was alive, for complaining to Annie, Jem, and (briefly, while on the phone) KC about the notorious constipation dialogue and sneering at Paul’s oh so grating normalcy, his complacency with wasting endless hours in front of the television and on his smartphone, his comfort within a lifestyle that Mako has done nothing but alternately loathe and crave. He allows himself to imagine Paul’s last moments – the morning’s allotted shitting hour being perhaps reduced to a mere five minutes, the compulsion to strain and push and tighten every muscle irresistible in the man’s desperation to get it all over with, and then the exploding, and then the falling, and then the red hot heat and the impossible pain in the left chest – and in direct contradiction to the humorous conversation that occurred at Bayou Hot Wings so many months before, there is so little that is actually funny about this type of death, so little when Mako could easily, given his similar gastrointestinal issues, go out in the same exact way; so little when Paul was a real person with a family and a job and a whole network of people and places and things surrounding him in his life. 

The man’s heart literally burst in his chest.

Mako touches fingers to his sternum, feeling the flatness of bone and thinking of the kaleidoscope of loving things within him. Jem. Kory. The Wellington Teasippers. His mother.

The next morning, Mako picks Annie up at her Freret Street apartment to go to the memorial service. He leaves the house with his mother’s forehead a phantom presence against his mouth; he’s been kissing her so much lately that she’s started to look at him funny.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asks him today, straightening his shirt collar and peering up into the soft, nine o’clock sadness of his bearded, silver-speckled face. “You’re like you were when you were little all over again. Always kissing me, always touching me.”

“Sorry,” he croaks, pulling away to snatch his keys up from the little Moroccan dish by the door. “I didn’t know it bothered you so much.”

“It doesn’t,” Mum retorts. “I just don’t want you getting all touchy-feely with me because you think I’m dying.”

Hand on the doorknob, Mako goes still and stares at Mum with his whole exploding heart on his face. “You  _ are  _ dying,” he says.

Mum, a half-crouched figure in her wheelchair, stares back. “You don’t know that.”

“I do.”

Three months ago and Mum would be raging at him in an instant – for daring to defy her, daring to think her anything but his invincible, unbeatable mother. Today, she simply shakes her head and tells him to, “Go to your funeral.”

Mako cries in the car and passes it off as mourning when Annie sees his damp face and red eyes. Maybe it is mourning. Maybe that’s all that he can call it.

At the wake, there are warm blocks of cheddar, Swiss, and Colby-Jack cheese served on platters of genuine silver alongside the plumpest, greenest green grapes that Mako has ever seen. Instrumental versions of Bette Midler and Sarah McLachlan songs play through unobtrusive overhead speakers, and two teenagers in black (who Mako assumes are Paul’s children) wander around the funeral home’s foyer, looking lost. Annie, who has never seen a dead body before, holds Mako’s hand as they stand in the slow-moving line to view the casket; behind them, Jerri makes gossipy faces and loudly whispers things to her husband about workplace affairs and abusive power dynamics. Paul is a Raggedy Andy in his tacky powder blue box, doves on the inside of the lid, “Going Home…” sewn into the coffin’s plush velvet lining. 

Mako finds himself in tears again, but not because of Paul. The funerary atmosphere is simply too much, too cloying. He is disgustingly thankful when, after talking on her cellphone outside of Rhodes Funeral Home for upwards of an hour, Priya comes in, looks at the five people clustered around the door in dark suits and LBDs (him among them), and says, “Let’s get out of here. We’ve paid our respects.”

Annie frowns. “Isn’t it disrespectful not to go to the service?”

Priya is already headed right back out the door as she says, “It’s not like we’ll ever see him or his family again.”

They – Mako, Annie, Jackson, Jerri, her husband, and the editor in chief – go to Luke in the Central Business District, where Priya pays for Blackberry-Bourbon Smashes that they all drink in honor of the late sports editor. Annie suggests remembering out loud what Paul meant to them all, but no one can muster any words of substance.

“I just remember that man drank a hell of a lot of Minute Maid,” Jackson says once the waiters come around with their Flammenkuchen, their jumbo Louisiana shrimp  _ en cocotte _ , their roasted jalapeño cheese grits, their andouille and green onion sausage. “One time I went in his office to ask him to turn the TV down. He had a whole mini-fridge full of Minute Maid orange juice.”

“He did love to watch ESPN,” Jerri notes in a tone of voice that just skirts the edge of snide.

“He was the sports editor,” Annie ejaculates by way of explanation, voice terse, her apparently having had enough of Jerri’s bullshit for the day. Mako puts a hand on her lower thigh beneath the table, and Jerri blinks at Annie, obviously a little taken aback.

“Well, what did he mean to  _ you _ , Little Miss Bailey?” she asks with a slightly accusatorial attitude. When her husband reaches over to gently grasp her bicep, she shakes him off with a vigorous flap of the arm, leaning in over her plate to fix Annie with sharply questioning eyes. 

Annie, for her part, looks as though she’s about to cry. She stares into her plate of crispy brussels sprouts and says, “I didn’t know him very well, but I’ve overheard him offer to host some of the writers for dinner from time to time, when they’ve been really short on funds. He was a middle-aged, Catholic white man and he tolerated – actually, no, didn’t tolerate – actively  _ supported _ his trans editorial assistant. He got his work in on time and saved Priya a lot of headaches, and God knows she’s needed that. He made coffee for all of us at least once.” Snuffling wetly – with stifled tears or the mucus of sickness, Mako cannot quite tell – Annie gives herself a hard shake and declares, “He deserves better than us sitting around complaining about him after his death.”

For a long moment mediated by the atmospheric noises of clinking silverware and restaurant small talk at adjacent tables, nobody says anything. Wanting instead to do something like kiss Annie where her temporal lobe communes with the inside of her skull or, possibly, to go out and stand on the streetcar line just beyond the door – wanting death; wanting blissful nonexistence; wanting to be with Paul in some figurative, Abrahamic sense, kicking it in front of some television in heaven with Minute Maid and Apple products – Mako raises his late change of heart and glass of bourbon into the air and announces to the table, “I’ll drink to that.”

Sitting at his right, Priya clinks her highball against his. “Cheers.”

Everyone takes a sip. Jerri excuses herself to go to the bathroom, and her husband – feeling awkward when left alone with her coworkers – disappears into the restaurant after her in turn. 

Brunch commences. Jackson attempts to liven up the congregation with chitchat about the upcoming issue and his article about timeshares in the French Quarter, to little avail. Halfway through Jackson and Jerri’s dialogue about the supposed voguishness of French doors in 2025, Mako glances over at Priya and finds her snickering over her phone – the screen of which plainly displays a blurry photograph of some faceless man’s penis.

“What the fuck,” he deadpans.

“Craigslist,” Priya offers, leaning part of the way into Mako’s personal space to show him the personal ad with which she is currently preoccupied. “A bunch of people have taken over the missed connections section and are using it to solicit for sex. Look at this. ‘ _ Sweet and shy twunk looking for big black cock to put me in my place. Reals only. I’ll host _ .’” She produces a schoolgirl giggle. “It’s amazing.”

“Why are you looking at this?” Mako asks, suddenly heedless of the fact that he’s talking to his employer and that they are both somewhere in the neighborhood of tipsy. Together, they crowd over her phone and flick through dick pic after dick pic, casually perusing men who are, in their own words, “thick in all the right places,” “lonely and discreet,” “in need of a good lay down,” and “missing a good guy’s pacifier.”

“Oh my God, do you think he’s an adult baby?” Priya snickers, reaching for her drink.

“I don’t want to answer that question for fear of you firing me,” Mako replies. “Oh my God, look at this! ‘ _ LOOKING FOR A MAN I MET IN 1990 AT CHEYENNE FRONTIER DAYS NAMED RON S _ .’ How much do you want to bet Ron S. is never going to see this ever in his life?” A pause, then: “Actually, that makes me kind of sad.”

“Why would I fire you when I’m looking at the same exact thing?” Priya asks. She gives Mako a deep, probing look that seems to dig into his skin like the claws of some climbing animal, grasping at his silk shirt and drawing pinpricks of blood to the surface of his right cheek. “I haven’t talked to you in a while,” she announces, apropos of nothing. “Where are you, Mako? What’s life like on your side of the world?”

“You say that as if I’m in an entirely different place.”

“Aren’t you?” she retorts. Her hand wanders again in the direction of her drink.

Mako wants to say nothing. At his left, Annie holds the majority of his post-therapy ramblings from the past seven months as a vessel holds water, her skin made of glass and him able to see all the fish swimming around within her, the aquatic plants dying, the smooth pebbles sinking, the bed of rough sand at the bottom of it all.

“Well, my mum is dying,” he says, clearing his throat. “I feel like that’s the only thing happening in my life worth talking about. Everything else feels like betrayal. The fact that I’m getting married and paying bills and regularly having sex and like, contributing directly to the flourishing of another life feels wrong. The fact that I’m presumably going to live for at least another fifty years feels wrong. Even going to someone else’s funeral today felt treasonous.” He turns away, back to his Flammenkuchen. “I didn’t need to tell you all that.”

“No, you did,” Priya replies. “You need to tell everyone you know because that’s the only way you’re going to understand how you feel, right? And even then, you still probably won’t understand it all until after she’s gone – maybe not until you’re almost gone yourself. And then it will be too late, but at least you’ll finally have understood it. You’ll finally have done what no one else has ever managed to do: gotten what it means.”

Mako watches Priya curiously, as if she has spontaneously grown a second head and sprouted big blue wings – wings that speak of her knowing; wings that call back to an other, painful existence that sits so close to his own. “Gotten what what means?” he asks.

Priya shrugs. “Anything you want.” 

Mako feels that he has never spoken with Priya before today. He might never speak with her again.

“I’ve just made a momentous decision,” she proclaims, suddenly ram-rod straight in her seat and scratching viciously at her head with her sharp, aubergine-colored nails. Amid the bewildered silence of her tablemates, Priya lays her left hand down on Mako’s shoulder, reaching her right arm across the table to touch her fingertips to the top of Jerri’s hand as well. “In honor of our dear Mako’s ailing mother, I’m buying him another drink–”

“Oh, no, you don’t have to do that–”

“And some bread pudding.”

“Really, Priya, it’s fine. It’s just my own little private tragedy and nothing else in the world has really changed–”

“Oh,  _ fuck _ the  _ fuck _ off with the bullshit politeness and self-hatred.” Priya punctuates this with a closed fist slammed down against the table, not quite hard enough to shake their drinks and tableware but sufficiently forceful to disturb their gleaming utensils, send them clinking briefly atop the tablecloth. She gives Mako a look of severe, vehement love. “It’s New Orleans. Live a little. Suck on my metaphorical tits. I promise I won’t hold it against you.”

In retrospect, this moment will be one of the happiest ones of this whole train wreck of a year. Now, Mako just feels fuzzywarm in all of his inner corners and crevices. He allows his teeth to show.

“Okay,” he says. “Thank you.”

Priya dips her head and affords him a toothy smile of her own. “You’re welcome.”


	22. 22

#  _ 22 _

On the weekends, he woke up before the sun. He always woke up before the sun, in fact – to heat the water and sit in the big metal tub for twenty minutes before school, to let the weight of his dirt fall off of his body and the dread collect slowly within him until it built to a fat white head on the surface of his skin – but on the weekends, the waking felt more significant because it was intentional, deliberate, voluntary. He actually wanted to wake up at the crack of dawn, to start his day with the sheep and goats and with Nana, who counted on him more and more as he shot up like a pretty brown weed and she began to show signs of a late yet all too expected withering.

He wanted to be pretty, too. For years he didn’t give a shit, and the process of prettification grated on him both physically and mentally – the texture of a sponge against his skin like insects crawling, the sight of his own face in the bathroom mirror so alien and eerie, the patience required to scrub under armpits and button nice shirts and tie the laces of new boots too much to bear – but by the time he turned fifteen, there grew something new inside of him, a strange desire, a dark impulse toward sexiness that he hadn’t even full grasp of. He just knew the girls at school talked about it in coded language: Vaseline on the lips language, T-shirts cropped just above the navel language, Sally Hansen on the nails language, covetous whispering when he walked past in Great-Uncle Harry’s shirt that made his shoulders seem especially broad.

(This was before Robin came out. This was before the liquored and chilly phone conversations about gender and sexuality that Mako would have with his elder sibling and his mother, before the understanding of his father’s homosexuality fully set in, before anyone told him that Great-Aunt Molly was a lesbian, before he’d gone to university to read Sappho, Foucault, and James Baldwin in a dorm room with the boy he was falling oh so slowly in love with. This was before he knew anything but the inside of his own skin and the way it squiggled and crawled and grew to lower mantle temperatures at night, anything but the shape of all of his classmates’ lips, anything but Mum’s favorite [and boring] shade of nail polish, anything but Robin turning up to Passover in Miss Shanna’s red dress from the ‘80s and ignoring Dad when he told them to go change clothes or suffer his wrath.)

So he woke up before the sun. Relieved himself in the bathroom and then went outside to squat by the side of the house while unraveling the hose to reach the metal basin they called their bathtub (or, in his earlier hydrophobic years, the spaceship). Made and gently kindled the fire beneath the tub with his bare hands, then laid in the grass and watched the fading stars as he waited for the water to get hot. Rid himself of his sleep clothes and climbed into the steaming tub, where the wondrous inspection really and truly began in earnest. 

He’d begun to grow thick black hair on his legs and in the place between them. The wiry curls sprouting up in the center of his chest and around his areolae, beneath his arms and as a dark, thoroughly mystifying halo surrounding his penis. His limbs were long and his shoulders seemed to stretch out along the entire length of the horizon, a manlike breadth to their lateral stretch, his hands bigger than they had ever been, the lines within their palms his grandmother’s favorite thing to pore over while pronouncing vague things like “long life” and “lots of love.” When a minimum of ten minutes in the tub had passed and it became apparent that neither Mum nor Nana Victoria would come to disturb his ostensible privacy, Mako allowed the inspection to take on a markedly sensual tone – feeling with such long fingers between his legs, touching the glans penis until he shivered and then crawling his digits spiderlike to his perineum and into the crevice beyond until the shivering occurred once more. His thoughts raced. Raced through Raukokore, ran heaving-lungs frantically through the backyards of RickyLee Tangonui and Charlie Ahoaho Whitu, Max Cohen and even the dreaded Short twins. He tossed and turned around and around in a bed with no sheets, a house with no window coverings, a hill with so many trees, him naked in the middle of it all. When he ejaculated, spilling semen into the bathwater and crying out all by himself, eyes opened up all over his skin and his entire body became hot with pleasure and guilt, the water that bubbled around him like an inescapable vellum envelope within which he sat and the sky above watching, full of ghosts and Jewish angels, judging him.

“Are you okay, baby?!” Nana Victoria called from inside the house, having heard his cry.

“I’m fine!” he called back, the eyes blinking, conjunctivital. “The water’s hot!”

“You want me to come tend the fire?!”

“No! No, I’m okay!” 

Before any further conversation could occur, Mako sank himself all the way into the tub until his body and head became fully submerged in the hot and soapy water. He always hated this, the aftermath. In it, his entire physical existence became weighted and heavy with the possibility of being perceived, with the invisible hands upon his skin and the kisses he’d probably never receive. 

In the bathtub with him, Hema Short laughed his loathsome donkey laugh and RickyLee pressed her palm into his thigh, kissy-faced.

“You feel good, eh,  _ tō tara? _ ” Hema asked. Mako wanted to tell him to fuck off, but instead he simply emerged from beneath the water, eyes stinging, and grabbed the sponge to finish washing himself off.

He rode his bike to school. It had been six years since Mum or Nana Victoria had been his chauffeur, taking him in the Mazda or the old 1969 Coupe Deville that would soon become his once Aunt Molly finished teaching him how to drive. Some mornings, Mako entertained the thought of riding Madonna to the schoolhouse – pulling up on his pretty palomino beauty and sweeping all the girls and boys off of their feet – but he never quite got past just watching Madonna sleep in her corral with her long golden legs curled under her body, then waving goodbye to her and Nana as he went off to straddle his Schwinn, to toss the apple he’d been munching on into the goat’s pen when he rode past, to cycle down the road past the house and the towering kauri tree and the place where Cher the black sheep had died, to find school amid the rapidly receding darkness of the early morning. He was always the sixth or seventh student out of fifteen in his class to arrive, and his appearance was always met with some sort of monologue by Pana Short or one of the butt-faced minions that always seemed to flock around the twins.

“Eh, look, it Sharkboy: the yellow pants wonder! Joe, you remember in Year Three when Mako pissed himself in P.E. and they brought him back in fuckin’ yellow pants? The yellow ass, mustard ass booty shorts with the little girly bow on the front? Remember how we used to say Mako pissed himself the first time he saw an Indian person? That’s what you call racism. They should put Sharkboy in jail for that. Aw, look, he’s mad. Ever notice when he get mad, his face get all red, and his ears? We just telling stories, Sharkboy! We just clowning! We not friends no more? C’mon, bro, you need to lighten up, as they say! Come sit with us at lunch! I’ll give you a knuckle sandwich! Ha! You heard that, Joe? You heard that, Hema? Knuckle sandwich! I’m funny as fuck, me.”

Hoani, the morning teacher with a perpetually weary tone, didn’t look up from his desk as he said, “Pana! Language?”

“I’m sorry, Hoani,” Pana said while giving Mako the V-sign, crossing his eyes, and dangling his tongue out of his mouth  _ haka _ -like. “I’m just making friends.”

“Nobody’s friends with you, Pana,” Charlie Whitu interjected from Mako’s right.

“Eh, shut the fuck up, orphan boy!” Pana exclaimed, like an attack dog in his easy excitability and proneness to bark at anything and anyone that came at him wrong. “Where the fuck your mom, eh?! In the ground where she fucking belong!”

“Pana!” Hoani actually raised his head this time. “The day hasn’t even started yet. Cool it with the ‘ _ fuck _ ’ and the ‘ _ fucking _ ’.”

“I love how that’s what’s so objectionable,” Mako said – not really talking to anyone, but saying words that were more than easy for anyone who wanted to listen to hear. “The fact that he’s saying the f-word, not the fact that he’s an actual, whole bully.”

“Mako, come on,” Hoani half-whined, probably somewhere on Mako’s level when it came to his desire to be here. “Give my coffee time to set in.”

“Yeah, Mako, give his coffee time to set in,” Pana said.

“I’m literally going to kill myself,” Mako announced, and Charlie started laughing. Walking into the room at that moment exactly, Joy McGarvey – the one white girl in their class – was overcome with a look of abject horror.

“I’ll go to your funeral,” she said.

Mako put his head down and murmured, “Doesn’t that just make everything all better?” Charlie kept laughing, Hoani sipped at his coffee, and Pana Short moved on to ripping on Joy’s denim overall dress, which was embroidered with Dalmatian puppies and only reached halfway down her thighs – not that any of this made the dress particularly offensive. Relentless ridicule was just Pana’s cup of tea.

Strangely, Mako wanted to kiss them all. Wanted to unhook the straps of Joy’s dress, slip his fingers between Charlie’s lips, muffle Pana’s fat mouth with his own. He stared out of the window until class started, then kept staring as the day commenced, his body in the room and his mind everywhere else. He’d have rather been at home, reading, working, sleeping. He’d have rather sunk into a pool of room temperature lovers and never seen the light of day again.

After the sad parade of classes that was school, Mako biked to  _ Te Whare _ to meet with Great-Aunt Molly for his weekly driving lesson. By this time, Molly had hired RickyLee’s older sister Harper to help out around the shop in the wake of her knee replacement surgery and advancing age. When Mako came ambling into  _ Te Whare _ the spring of his fifteenth year, there Harper invariably was, reading a magazine about cars or otherwise personal fitness behind the counter.

“Molly!” Harper would immediately yell in the direction of the shop’s back room upon his arrival. “Mako’s here!” Then, glancing up from her magazine, she smiled at Mako from beneath her boyish crop of hair and asked, “You want some bubblegum?”

Mako folded his arms over the countertop. “Do I have to pay for it?”

“Of course,” Harper said, grinning. “I’ll give you the family discount, though.”

“What’s that?” Mako asked, already digging around in his pocket for spare change.

“Pay what you can. I’ll spot you the rest.”

As far as Mako knew, nobody in Raukokore had money. This financial generosity of Harper’s made him like her more than he already did for her cuteness, for the jazz darling raspiness of her voice, for the spaghetti strap tank tops she wore as the weather grew warmer, for the rumored tattoo she kept on her lower back. He dropped a fifty-cent coin on the counter and watched, a little transfixed, as Harper scooped it up with one dainty brown hand to pop into the register, then swiped a pack of Hubba Bubba from the glass display case and slid it to him across the surface of worn cherry wood.

“Thank you for your patronage,” she pronounced, somewhat sarcastically.

“Um,” Mako said, carefully peeling his pack of gum open.

“How was school?” 

Mako dropped a pink rectangular prism into his mouth and began to chew. “Sucked. As always.”

“It wasn’t so bad when I was there,” Harper said, reaching to take the empty wrapper from him so that she could eventually discard it in the plastic rubbish bin behind the counter. “My sis seems to be under the impression that you like it. According to her, you’re the smartest kid in class.”

“Just because I’m smart doesn’t mean I like it there.”

Harper frowned, taking in his ovine chewing, him in his grandmother’s nice sweater, him in his stylishly ripped blue jeans. She ran a hand briefly through her short hair. “Tell me something you learned today.”

Mako dove briefly into his memory. “Hoani talked about phylogenetic trees. They show the relationship between, between different species at different points in their evolution.”

“See, that’s cool!” Harper replied with a grin. “My mum doesn’t believe in all that evolution stuff.” She released an incredulous laugh. “Her thing is birds and reptiles. She always tells me, every time it comes up, ‘I don’t see how a lizard could turn into a bird!’ I’m like,  _ mum _ . It happens over billions and billions of years – not overnight.”

“My mum says that people like that are fundamentally lacking in imagination and faith,” Mako said. “Which I think is weird, because aren’t the people who are against evolution full of faith?”

“It’s a different kind of faith.” 

At that moment, Great-Aunt Molly came hobbling out of the back room, her hair newly cut since the last time Mako had seen her. Harper and Mako watched her limp up to the swinging half-door that separated the space behind the counter from the space afforded to customers, adjust the clock hanging on the wall so that twelve o’clock pointed directly upward instead of slightly askew, push her gilded aviators up her nose, and then, finally, notice the two young ones staring at her.

“What are you kids looking at?” she snapped with her customary snark. “It’s like you’ve never seen a seventy-seven year old woman before.”

Mako blew a meager, pink, deliciously sweet bubble and willingly popped it with his wolfish cuspids. “Nana wanted to know how you were getting along with your knee.”

“That old bitch can get on the phone if she wants to know so bad,” Molly shot back. Mako perceived in her retort no real animosity toward Nana Victoria – just a characteristic causticness that ran just as deeply as his mother’s did. Molly began to toddle off in the direction of the door, calling out, “You coming,  _ tamaiti? _ Tell Harper goodbye.”

Mako, feeling abruptly awkward, gave Harper a little wave as he stepped away from the counter. “Thank you for the gum,” he said.

Harper saluted him, adorable in her impishness. “Don’t mention it, Sharkboy.” As Mako left, he glanced over his shoulder just in time to see Harper bend over the rubbish bin to throw away his gum wrapper. Her tank top rode up in the back, revealing a  _ koru _ swirl in thick black ink.

“Knew it,” Mako whispered. He wanted to kiss that swirl, as he wanted to kiss almost everyone he knew.

From the passenger seat of her 1982 Ford LTD Country Squire, with her cane splayed across her lap and her baseball cap pulled down low on her forehead, Great-Aunt Molly indicated with gnarled fingers the gas pedal, the brake pedal, the clutch, the gearshift, the turn signal, the speedometer, and the fuel gauge. She asked Mako to adjust the rear and side-view mirrors, to turn around and around in circles in the parking lot of  _ Te Whare _ until he grew dizzied and slightly irritated. Then, they drove at half-speed through Raukokore, past the tall and steepled church and the schoolhouse with the red  _ whare _ gate, past the older teenagers that lingered on the roadside while smoking cigarettes and drinking from dark forty-ounce bottles, across the big and tall bridge overlooking the river, all the way to Nana Victoria’s farmhouse, where Mako helped Molly up the porch steps and into the kitchen.

“Old girl!” Molly cried upon seeing her younger sister, shuffling over to give the woman a hug, to bury her hands in the mane of silver, leonine hair. “Your little boy tells me you’ve been talking about me. Your little boy is shaping up to be quite a driver, you hear?”

People had a habit of speaking about Mako as if he was Nana Victoria’s son rather than Rui Ngata’s. Mako could never bring himself to mind, though he knew it grated on his mother when she was present. 

Kissing her sister’s weathered old face, Nana Victoria produced one of her delightfully throaty laughs. “Does he go slow for you?”

Molly’s face, which was typically warped with tension, became quite serene. “As slow as I want.”

When they turned to look at him in unison, Mako simply smiled at his elders. Sometimes, it seemed to him that they treasured him for the silliest of reasons, the most basic kindnesses he afforded to them as their kin, the only thing they had left that was wild and flourishing in the world. Sometimes, it seemed to him that they were the sole reason he was still alive.

He pulled his bike out of the station wagon. He sat outside with Tina Turner, watching her walk in slow, caprine circles around him as he crossed his legs on the grass and intermittently pointed out some interesting figure in the sky – a cloud shaped like the birthmark on his ribs or the daytime moon. When he was younger, he talked to her about his day – detailing every verbal and physical melee with the Short twins and factoid about the sun’s inevitable expansion into a red giant; the shitty, greasy personal pan pizza he had for lunch and the cute thing Max said in English class – but by now, in his fifteenth year, he’d devolved into a full-figured quietness and an introspection that Nana Victoria found worrying and he himself couldn’t really understand, nor did he really try to. The relatively taciturn state he once only existed in at school had somehow bled into his home life. Tina Turner pushed her head into his left shoulder as if asking why.

“Where did you, my only friend, go?” she beseeched him.

“I’m not your only friend,” he replied, backsliding into open speech. “You hang out here with Paula Abdul and Frank Sinatra and Bruce Springsteen and the rest of them all day long.”

“They’re not my friends,” Tina Turner scoffed, circling around his back with a twitching Oreo tail. “They’re my family. There’s a difference.”

Mako wondered if she was right. When she appeared in front of him again, he reached out and gently grasped one of her perfect, furry ears in his hand, leaned forward and kissed her on the face, wordlessly promising her his fidelity.

He went back inside the house. Mum hadn’t returned from work yet, and Nana Victoria and Great-Aunt Molly sat around in the living room, drinking chai tea with milk while  _ Coronation Street _ reruns played on the television. 

“Go make yourself a cup if you want, Mako,” Nana Victoria stopped mid-conversation to say. Her voice grew in volume as he passed further and further out of the room: “Just be careful if you’re using one of my nice cups! And let the tea cool before you just go on and drink it!”

“Okay, Nana!” Mako poured hot water from the kettle into a stoneware mug from 1986, then stood around in the kitchen waiting for the teabag to steep. He listened to Nana Victoria and Great-Aunt Molly converse in the next room.

“That little girl has it,” Molly was saying. “The affliction.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nana Victoria replied. Her tone of voice suggested that she, in fact, did not know what Molly was talking about.

Still, Molly cried, “Yes, you do!” Lower, more quietly, she said, “That girl is  _ gay _ , Vick. I know one when I see one.”

“And what are you going to do about it?”

“Nothing! I can’t do anything. I’m over the hill. I’ve got one foot in the grave, girl.”

“Don’t be so dramatic,” Nana Victoria sneered. “You’ve got a few good years left.”

“Think about what she wants, though.”

“Oh, are we talking about the gay girl again?”

“I know when I was her age… well, I’m not saying I  _ wanted _ an older lover, especially not a saggy old piece of shit like me–”

“Why are you being so mean to yourself? You shouldn’t say such things, Moerangi, they hurt my feelings–”

“It would have been nice, though, you know? To have someone older who knew where I was in my life, who was all alone like me, a sexual rebel.”

“You’re not all alone.”

“Well, of course, I have you, my dear. That’s not what I was talking about, though–”

“That’s not what I was talking about, either! Did you know that my Rui dated a woman for years when she lived in Wellington?”

“ _ No _ .”

“She did. And don’t tell me you never suspected with Harry.”

“You know what? Harry was just plain  _ goofy _ . A right nutter, he was.”

“A right nutter… and very fruity.”

Mako stirred milk into his tea. As Mum’s cherry red Mazda trundled up the dirt driveway, he snuck pours of Nana’s whiskey into his chai, then went to go sit in his bedroom and not pay attention to his homework, fall asleep drunk, and wake up red-eyed and exhausted for dinner two and a half hours later, Great-Aunt Molly already having driven off back to  _ Te Whare _ to close the shop down.

In the night, he touched himself to go to sleep. He bit his lower lip and thought about Harper, who was gay, and Max, who taught him English and history on weekday afternoons. He stretched the touching into thirty, forty minutes of half-aimless sensual exploration, drowsy, still a little tipsy from the afternoon’s infusion of Jim Beam. When he knew he would come, he stopped long enough to go to the bathroom, empty his ejaculate into the toilet, and then get back in bed and fall asleep dead away. Then the weekend would come, and he would wake up before the sun to masturbate again and work with Nana Victoria all day long.

They fed the goats alfalfa and clover in the cornflower blue light of the early morning. They took the sheep up into the hills to graze and drift in cumulus configurations along the verdant Raukokore landscape. Mako read aloud from a Janet Frame novel and Nana Victoria played  _ Rumours  _ on the Walkman, danced barefoot in the grass despite her heel spurs and her aching bones. Then they came back to the house and milked the ewes and the nannies. Then they heated the milk on the stove and Mako did all of the stirring, all of the checking, all of the draining while Nana kicked back on the couch and drank ice water from a mason jar. Then they stored the cheese curds on an overhead shelf in the kitchen, where they would slowly metamorphose into banon, bucheron, chabichou, and xynotyri. Then the day was already halfway gone, for Saturday work seemed to eat time like a hungry monster. Sometimes, they went out to brush dirt and hay out of the horses’ manes and clean out the grime caked into the underside of their hooves with their bevel knives. Sometimes, they played Scrabble at the dining room table and Mako gleefully beat Nana Victoria into the ground with words such as AWAKEN, QUALIFY, and FINICKY. Sometimes, they simply sat in front of the television while the cheese aged and the animals milled and the laundry tumbled around and around in the washer and dryer outside, Mako’s head in Nana Victoria’s lap, her fingers carding slowly through the curls of his hair. Sometimes, Mako went into his room and pulled the perpetual mess of papers and books up from the floor, and in this mess he discovered the endless stock of index cards containing vocabulary words from years long past. 

#    
  


**ROTATION  
** the spinning motion of a planet on its axis

**AXIS  
** an imaginary line that passes through earth's center   
and its north and south poles

**TIDE  
** the periodic rise and fall of the sea level   
under the gravitational pull of the moon

**GRAVITY  
** the force of attraction between all masses  
in the universe

#    
  


He tried to collect them all and throw them away, but new cards always seemed to turn up every time he looked. 

“Like Kafka,” he whispered to himself. In the room’s darkest corner, Great-Uncle Harry stood with his arms crossed and his thick soldier’s frame propped against the chest of drawers, giggling at this absurdity, this intertextuality. Mako did not quite agree with his mirth, so he turned away to place ROTATION, AXIS, TIDE, and GRAVITY into the rubbish bin.

When spring slid into summer, Mako got his car. He drove to  _ Te Whare _ to buy fuzzy red dice for the rearview and a pack of candy cigarettes to fake smoke while he cruised down the Raukokore roadways. Harper spent upwards of five minutes outside running her hands over the Coupe Deville’s sleek and sharp edges, squatting in front of the hubcaps that Mako had cleaned himself with a cocktail of laundry detergent and dishwashing soap, palming the beige leather seats. When Great-Aunt Molly came out of the front of the shop to sweep off the textured rubber rug before the door, Harper asked her, “Can I go on a ride with Mako?” and Mako, not expecting this, thought the majority of his guts would jump directly out of his mouth and scurry off into the hills, never to be seen again.

Molly made a sound like  _ tch! _ “Be back in five minutes or it’s coming out of your paycheck.”

Harper leapt into the air in her glee, skipping around to the passenger side of the car. She gave Mako an anticipatory look as she opened the door and slid into the seat. 

“C’mon, let’s go!” she said. “Clock’s ticking!” 

The fire effectively under his ass, Mako hopped into the Cadillac and keyed the ignition to life. He listened to Harper’s giggle, watched her bounce up and down in her seat in her pale denim cutoffs and felt faraway, high in the air, truly and uniquely happy. 

He drove to the bridge. That morning, Nana Victoria had taken a piece of hair near his ear and threaded it into a short, faintly adorable plait; this gently fluttered against the side of his face in the wind that blew through the car via the open windows. Harper found, after some difficulty, a Top 40 station that played Celine Dion, Nelly Furtado, Matchbox 20, and the Huey Lewis/Gwyneth Paltrow cover of an old Smokey Robinson hit. With a hand hanging out of the window, she sang along at the top of her lungs – a little off-key, but enjoyable to listen to nonetheless.

“ _ You’re gonna fly away. Glad you’re goin’ my way... _ ” 

Mako looked at Harper instead of the road.

“ _ I love it when we’re cruisin’ together… _ ” 

She was beautiful, brown skin and eyes deep enough to stand in. 

“ _ Music is played for love. Cruisin’ is made for love… _ ”

The Raukokore River stretched out below them, gray-blue, flanked on each side by carpets of green grass and the skyward spring of bulrushes.

“ _ I love it when we’re cruisin’ together _ …”

Mako stopped the car in the middle of the road. Harper paused in her singing mid-lyric and gave him a curious look.

“What?” she asked.

“Do you like girls?” 

Harper’s face became instantly furrowed with confusion and surprise. She bugged her eyes at him. “What kind of a question is that?”

Mako, who had no sense of timing, tact, or guile, could not stop talking once he started. “Molly says that you have an affliction. That you’re gay. She didn’t say it in a bad way – she’s gay, too. At least I think she is. That’s how she was talking about it. I don’t think it’s a bad thing if you  _ are _ gay. I mean – don’t tell anyone – but I think I might be, too? Not all the way, though. I don’t know how that works. Have you ever kissed a girl? I’ve never kissed anyone except for my mum and my Nan. I’ll probably never kiss anyone ever in my life. Everyone here hates me. I wouldn’t say I hate everyone back, but my feelings aren’t exactly positi–”

“Wait, wait, wait, stop!” Harper cried. She did not look angry – just overwhelmed with an emotion that Mako in his undiagnosed autistic state could not quite identify. “I… Molly said  _ what? _ ”

“She said, ‘that little girl has it: the affliction.’ She said, ‘that girl is gay.’”

Harper’s face fell, as if it had been none too gently struck. She glanced out of the window, at the seemingly endless stretch of the Raukokore River beneath the bridge. “Just because I wear my hair short…” she murmured with a sigh, and then she was silent, and Mako stared at her, and Huey Lewis and Gwyneth Paltrow petered out into a monotone test of the emergency broadcast system.

On the drive back to  _ Te Whare _ , Harper eventually opened her mouth to say, “Everyone doesn’t hate you, Mako.”

Mako frowned into the steering wheel and the crumbling asphalt beyond the windshield. “They would if they knew I was gay.”

Harper released a brief peal of laughter. “You’re not gay, though,” she said. “You’re something else.”

“Are  _ you _ something else?”

“Yes,” Harper replied. Again her hand hung out of the window and she made with it small fluttering motions as Sugar Ray streamed through the Cadillac’s tinny speakers; again she was beautiful, smiling a little, seemingly omniscient in her young adulthood and her air of preternatural wisdom. “You can’t tell anyone, though. Not even Molly. It has to be our secret.”

Mako could agree to this. He thought once more of maybe kissing Harper and her Maori tattoo as she ruffled his hair and slipped out of the Cadillac, as he watched her make her way back into  _ Te Whare _ to do her work and clutch their novel secret close to her chest, but he kept this thought to himself as he’d keep his and Harper’s shared otherness deep inside him. He sang songs along with the radio all the way home.

The next weekend, Great-Aunt Molly died. She went in her sleep, for no apparent reason other than her age and perhaps her ballooning, toxic cynicism as she got on in years. She went without ever having had a lover, a mentor, or a protégée, her all alone in the world, a sexual rebel. She went to join the other Ngatas, to walk in the realm of half-dreams and open doors.

Being that everyone in Raukokore knew Molly as the owner of the village’s sole general store, everyone in Raukokore accordingly found themselves at one time or another in the town church on the day of her funeral, a Saturday. Mako could pick out every classmate and teacher he’d had over the preceding nine years of his life in the considerable mass of people crammed into wooden pews older than he was; could pick out Nelson Whitu, Charlie’s hulking alcoholic father, who killed Cher the black sheep with his Chevy when Mako was ten; could pick out Harper and RickyLee Tangonui in matching blue and purple shift dresses, holding hands, the former crying though she tried her damnedest to hide it; could pick out Max Cohen the afternoon teacher, who gave Mako a sympathetic smile that sent his heart aflutter when they locked eyes across the room.

“Stop all that looking,” Mum reprimanded him in an undertone, swatting him viciously on the arm and then grabbing his chin to turn his face around toward the front of the church. “Look at your aunt. Be present.”

Mako was present, but he didn’t want to look anymore at Great-Aunt Molly’s inert body dressed in an ultra-feminine gown she’d never worn in life, her face made up so pale that she’d lost all of her beautiful brownness. He didn’t want to look at Nana Victoria, who was now the only Ngata of her generation left in the world and displayed the appropriate degree of wet-faced, quaking-shoulders sorrow in response to this aloneness. He wanted to walk outside and get in his car and drive until he couldn’t drive anymore, because the world seemed inverted without this eldest Ngata in it, without Molly’s psychological omnipresence, her hobbling around  _ Te Whare _ and bitching at her younger sister on the phone. 

Some things were never supposed to change.

At night, Molly appeared in his bedroom and made him open all of the windows. 

Summer became fall and the school year began anew.  _ Te Whare _ passed into Nana Victoria’s possession, and she – too busy with the farm and plagued increasingly by pain from her heel spurs and strange bouts of nausea and abdominal cramps – allowed most of the responsibilities where the general store was concerned to fall to the Tangonuis and, much to his surprise, Mako, who she installed in the store on a biweekly basis. Under this arrangement, Mako and Harper were allowed to drift further and further into each other’s orbit without supervision, to sell ice blocks to the local children on the days when the truck came with new popsicles, to play ‘90s rock bands like The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Foo Fighters in the shop while dancing around in their jandals and their holey blue jeans, to make vague comments about the sexiness of various customers who hovered around their age cohort. Still, Mako did not think of Harper as a friend. Still, when she passed him behind the counter – her hands on his shoulders, in his hair, on his neck – he took these touches as miracles he was not quite deserving of, as evidence of her pity for him instead of her mounting level of comfort. Still, he thought of her in the bathtub and the bed and wanted so badly for her to think of him as well, to moan, to touch herself as he touched himself. He invariably drove home every Tuesday and Thursday night worked up, horny, half in love and not knowing how to deal with it.

From her California king, Nana Victoria called out to him after the telltale swing of the screen door. “Mako!”

“Coming, Nana!” Mako took the walk to the back of the house to calm himself down. By the time he was at his grandmother’s bedside, his core temperature was a comfortable ninety-seven degrees. 

“Hey, baby,” Nana Victoria said with a loving lilt in her voice that she reserved solely for him (and, Mako assumed, for his mother when she was growing up). Reaching for her nightstand, she retrieved a small stack of index cards. “I went into your room to do your laundry today. Look what I found.” 

#    
  


**UNIVERSE  
** all of space and everything in it

**CONSTELLATION  
** an imaginary pattern of stars in the sky

**REVOLUTION  
** the movement of an object around another object

**BLACK HOLE  
** an object so massive and dense that even  
light cannot escape its gravity

#    
  


Mako shuffled the cards in his hands. “I can’t believe there’s more.”

“You should do something with them,” Nana Victoria said. As he climbed into bed with her, her hands went to his head, petting it as he laid it down against her sternum. “I like the little stars and planets you drew around the words. They’re cute. We could make a bulletin board, pin them all up in your room.”

“They’re trash,” Mako uttered with a sigh.

“Nothing is trash.” Saying this, Nana laughed a little, pushed her fingertips into Mako’s scalp, the sensitive parts of it that tickled and made him giggle. “Not even shit, my dear.”

Mako wrapped his arms around his grandmother and held her close. Her palms brushed his face, the back of his neck; below him, her stomach and chest expanded and contracted in a slow, vaguely loving rhythm, the bones within creaking, aching, nearly as old as Great-Aunt Molly’s where they rested then in the ground.

“Tell me about work,” she said.

“Hema Short tried to steal a bottle of rum.”

“Ooh! Did you kick his ass, Mako? Did you show him who was boss?”

“No, but Harper did. She whooped him with a broom, caught him in the head with it.” Mako allowed himself to laugh about this.

Nana Victoria laughed as well. “That’s a girl who can take care of herself. I’m glad Moerangi found her.”

“Great-Aunt Molly was in love with her, right?” Mako asked without thinking, feeling he could say anything to Nana Victoria and she would not hate or rage at him as others in his life would; at worst, she would only say nothing.

She did not say nothing then. She curled her fingers around the shell of his ear and produced an audible exhale, said, “No. She was in love with what she represented.” Then, smacking him gently on the cheek: “I knew you were listening on that day. Little eavesdropper.”

Mako turned his face into Nana Victoria’s belly. He murmured, “I think about her.”

“Moerangi?”

“Harper.”

Nana Victoria closed her eyes. She touched Mako’s shoulders as Harper had earlier, the contact fleeting, affectionate. “She’s much older than you are. You’re still a baby, my  _ moko _ .”

Mako raised his head then to give his grandmother a look of deep, almost comical distress. Smiling sadly, Nana Victoria cupped his face in her hands and brought him in closer to kiss his brow.

“You’re still a baby, my  _ moko _ ,” she repeated, them all alone in the house, all alone with each other. “Don’t try to grow up so fast.”

That night, he repeated his whiskey tea ritual and fell asleep with great cetacean fish swimming in his head. The next day in class, he doodled thick Sistine Chapel bodies in the margins of his geometry worksheet, and while Hoani drew various triangles left-handed on the chalkboard, Joy McGarvey leaned all the way over in her seat at Mako’s left to demand in a harsh whisper, “Okay, what are you drawing now?”

“Nothing.” If Harper’s thin eyes and the ovoid curve of her stomach appeared within one of his ballpoint Sibyls, or if Charlie’s floppy hair and crooked teeth appeared in the newly created Adam, Mako did not consciously notice it.

“Oh my God,” Joy gasped, nearly falling out of her desk. “Are you drawing dicks?”

“Shut the  _ fuck _ up, Joy.”

“Eh, who said ‘ _ fuck _ ’?” Hoani asked as he turned to face the class, holding his piece of chalk up in the air in a manner Mako supposed was intended to be threatening. When Joe Taiwhanga, Tane Paenga, both of the Short twins, and Delilah Reweti all pointed fingers at Mako, Hoani sent him outside for the remainder of the math lesson. He took his worksheet and pen with him and sat drawing out in the hallway, cross-legged, ignoring everyone who walked by.

At recess, while the rest of his class engaged in various inane activities out on the concrete slab outdoors, he was made to remain in the classroom and clean the student desks off with shaving cream. Minutes into his scrubbing, Max came into the room with a stack of transparencies and a thermos of what smelled like coffee.

“Oh, Mako!” Max laughed a little and went to sit at the teacher’s desk in the front of the room, to dump his transparencies down against the old wood and remove the clubmaster sunglasses from his face. “I heard you said a dirty word.”

Mako shrugged, but said nothing. He never knew what to say to Max that wasn’t the answer to some question posed to the class as a whole. 

Max, of course, took no offense. He, the eternal conversationalist, began to shuffle through his transparencies and kept talking.

“I’ve always wondered about that, you know. How swearwords came to be. Language is entirely arbitrary, you see; we’ve always been the ones deciding what words mean and how they are utilized. What, then, is the use of designating certain words as unusable except in particular circumstances that depend on, say, the speaker’s age or the appropriateness of the situation? That’s not very democratic, in my opinion.” Max paused then to look at Mako, to watch him bent over a desk near the back of the room, pushing Barbasol around in sudsy circles into the oak. He said, “Say ‘ _ fuck _ .’”

Mako raised his head to give Max a disbelieving look. “What?”

“Say ‘ _ fuck _ .’ Or ‘ _ shit _ ’, or whatever bad word you want.” Max grinned. “I relieve you.”

Mako glanced down at his foamy hands, uncertain. “Why would I say that, though?”

“Because it feels good to break the rules.” Max raised his thermos to his lips and, before indulging in a brief sip, added, “And because none of your classmates get to do the same.”

“Don’t you make the rules?” Mako asked.

“Me? No.” Max put on a gentle, nearly affectionate smile. “I’m as bound to them as you are.”

Mako swallowed thickly. The artifacts of the classroom suddenly alive with possibility, palpability, and sheer fucking old age, he felt touched all over his face and his insides by them, by shaving cream and elderly wood, by the thick scent of Max’s coffee in the air, by Max himself. He was dizzied at being touched in this way. Looking all around himself at newly cleaned desks and the plaster peeling itself in thin strips off of the ceiling, by the children’s drawings on the walls and the labeled pictures of animals, plants, and planets, he felt shaken and abruptly, briefly connected to the world, as if the objects that surrounded him were not simple shapes but instead all linked to his body by way of shimmering threads of invisible silk, drifting within his orbit and speaking soft words in his direction, acknowledging the physical reality of him, his Makoness. The high wouldn’t last, but in the midst of it, he was free enough to stand up on the tips of his toes and jump around in a circle and yell at the top of his lungs in heaven’s direction – “ _ Fuck! Fuck! Shit! Dammit! Fuck! _ ” – not quite happy, not quite pleased, but alive, feeling a capital  _ E _ Emotion.

Max laughed and applauded his outburst. When Mako stood panting with his hands covered in suds, the teacher came around to bring him a roll of paper towels, ripping him off two at a time and saying, “I reckon that felt good, didn’t it?”

Mako was reminded of Hema Short’s appearance in his bathtub so many months ago. He tried to ignore the twinge in his lower abdomen as he wiped his hands off and replied, “It did.” Together, he and Max wiped shaving cream from each desk, watching each other, silently probing for purposes that felt deeply uncertain and even seemed to work against each other at times. Mako came to take another paper towel from Max and the man’s hand gently brushed his, goosebumping his skin, sending his stomach careening swiftly through the floor.

“You seem nervous,” Max noted with a laugh intended to soothe.

Mako felt awake and impossibly warm. “I’m always nervous,” he said.

Fall slid into winter and then spring with the shifting of things that had appeared unchanging for the longest. Mako fit into more and more of Harry Ngata’s old clothing – the shirts that drowned him in previous years, the old leather jacket lined with sheep’s wool, the work boots stained with long-dried paint, the earrings of pure gold that had gone untouched for such a long time. He wore all of these things when he accompanied Nana Victoria to the cemetery to place wreaths of flowers and small triangles of cheese beside the headstones of dead Ngatas. He wore these things when he worked with Harper Tangonui, mopping the floor of  _ Te Whare _ , singing and playing air guitar, putting her bike in the back of the Cadillac before he drove her home. He wore these things when he hung around with Tina Turner in the chill of the outdoors, her licking his earlobes like a dog and him laughing, dragging his fingernails up and down her flanks. He wore these things when he drove around town in his hand-me-down car, fulfilling his oral fixation with cherry- and grape-flavored lollipops that hung out of the right side of his mouth. Pana and Hema Short joined a gang. This became apparent when they showed up to school one day in matching denim jackets featuring many large, lupine patches and embroidered along the yoke with the words “LONE WULF PACK.” When Mako pointed out the contradiction implied in a pack of lone wolves, he was summarily beaten into the concrete slab and sent home with a steadily blackening eye. RickyLee came to visit the farmhouse later that day, to ask after Mako and see if he was okay. She told him that Harper was seeing someone. Someone who drove a truck, someone who delivered things to the dumb, toothless yokels of Raukokore. Mako took her home in his Cadillac and did not come up to the house to say hello to the rest of the family, did not do anything but sigh and stare and eventually drive away after RickyLee kissed the violet blooming around his left eye. The next day, all the girls could not stay all of their whispering and all of their giggling. For English class, he wrote a story about a mother who made and ate her offspring with a sort of factory-like methodology: her having children only to eat them in their second or third month of life, her rejoicing at the semi-regular instance of twins, her utilizing Ancient Egyptian techniques to remove the infants’ tender brains through their nasal passages, her fattening the children up before eventually consuming them. Max gave the story an A, but called the house later that week to express mild concern for Mako’s emotional state. Mum interpreted the story as a personal attack against her and confiscated Mako’s car keys for a week in retaliation. Stuck in the house, Mako played  _ Final Fantasy VII _ on PlayStation and watched the Richard Simmons workout tapes of the past. RickyLee continued to telephone to ask what he was doing, to get homework help and share pointless gossip about their classmates. Eventually, Mako asked Nana Victoria to just tell the girl that he wasn’t home. His masturbation increased from twice to three times a day, especially when the break from school came and the weather was at its chilliest. Then, just in time for his sixteenth birthday, he got his car keys back and was free to do all of his aimless driving through Raukokore once again.

The weekend before school started again, RickyLee threw a party to which all of her classmates were invited. Rather than going – rather than showing up to the house cute as could be to drink cheap beer and pick fights with the Shorts, to sit upstairs with Harper and try to kiss her with a mouth full of mourning, to eventually leave in tears and maybe try to drown himself in the Raukokore River – Mako bought four joints of Holy Grail from Hema and smoked, drove around town, swung by Abel Hipango the cripple kid’s house to pick him up and take him wherever he wanted. On the bridge where Harper told him he was something else, he ran his mouth.

“Do you ever, like, think about how you’re being sent conflicting messages about what’s right and wrong all the time? Especially when it comes to like, society as a whole, and not just what you yourself do? And even that contradicts itself. Because so much of our media operates under the logic that like, broad trends in society and the way that we live is the result of individual choice, when it’s pretty much the opposite. I only like, eat what I eat for breakfast because that’s what my mum and my Nan have always eaten for breakfast, and they only eat what they’ve eaten for breakfast because that’s what their parents ate for breakfast, and those people only ate what they ate for breakfast because of community conditions that made whatever they ate the most viable or sensible thing to eat. And then, like, college. Like, why would I go to college except to have an easier time getting a job in the future? If I wanted to learn about like, Russian literature, I could just fucking read it and read about it, and that would be a perfectly acceptable way of acquiring that knowledge, but it wouldn’t be like, accepted in any way by the people who want to hire me in the city. I could work on cars for three years straight and learn everything there is to learn about them, but unless I have a fucking piece of paper that says that I learned about them, I’m basically useless. And I don’t get that. Why is informal knowledge so, like, bad? Because you can’t confirm it, I guess. Because it’s not standardized. It’s sad that we can’t just trust and like, value each other. I forget what I was getting at. Oh, yeah! It’s like, capitalism is supposed to be the greatest economic system ever, right? And communism is all wrong. That’s what we’re told in school. But then, like, I’ll be reading or watching something or like, playing a video game, and there are all of these things in it that’ll just implicitly – or no, not even implicitly – they’ll straight up say that capitalism fucking sucks! It’s a heartless, soulless, what… what was that word Max used the other day?  _ Exploitative _ . It’s an exploitative system. And I’m like, well what the hell am I supposed to believe?”

“Aren’t you supposed to decide for yourself what you believe?” Abel managed to snag enough airtime to say.

“I guess that makes sense, but you’re supposed to decide for yourself based on the messages you get, which all contradict each other! That’s the point!”

“But  _ everything _ contradicts, Mako.” Abel grabbed the joint out of Mako’s hand, stuck it into his own mouth, took one long, greedy drag. Where Mako’s legs swung a little over the side of the bridge, his remained entirely still through the powers of inertia and congenital paraplegia. “Everything contradicts and there’s no one right choice, no one right thing, no one singular truth for anybody or anything,” he said. “Acting like there is is just asking for heartbreak.”

Mako watched Abel exhale pungent ganja smoke. It was what he needed to hear – then and before, at Cher’s death and Great-Aunt Molly’s – but he wasn’t ready to listen. As he took the marijuana cigarette back, he gazed at the moon’s rippling reflection on the river’s surface and did not perceive any rippling brightness inside of himself. He thought about the party taking place less than a whole mile away and perceived nothing but stupidity.

Without warning, Abel looked at Mako and asked, “Do you have any friends?”

Mako’s brow furrowed, a silent question mark.

“’Cause you’re kind of talking… like a lot.”

This made it all come together for Mako. Instantly sheepish, he began to shake his head. “I’m sorry. I do that. I just have a lot of thoughts and it’s, it’s hard to uh… throttle them.” Cutting his eyes a little at Abel, he asked, “Do  _ you _ have any friends,  _ egg? _ ”

Abel, who spoke very little in class and whose neck went tomato red every time RickyLee so much as looked at him, blew a raspberry. “More friends than you,  _ egg _ .”

“Like hell.”

Their loneliness existed so palpably between them. 

When Abel wanted to go home, Mako lifted him into his arms bridal style and carried him back to the car, he himself having gotten so big and Abel having remained over the years so small. Mako felt as though he could kiss Abel – a boy he’d known for what felt like forever – and nothing, absolutely nothing would go wrong, but as always, he kept his hands and his mouth to himself. On his way back to the farm, he passed the Tangonui house and saw all of his classmates out in the garage, friends by virtue of the night and the sweetening influence of alcohol.

“Mako!” Pana Short yelled at the side of his ever so iconic car. “Get your ass out o’ there!”

Mako drove away. He went home and found his grandmother laid up in bed, blood in her stool, her resting fitfully. 

“Hey,  _ moko _ ,” she whispered as his arms came around her from behind, his face in the center of her back, his hands in her gut. “You’re home early.”

“I missed you,” he said, not lying.

“I missed you, too,” came her reply edged with sighs. “I miss you always. Even when you’re right here with me.”

The next day, when her vomitus came up red, Mako and Mum drove her three hours west to the hospital in Tauranga. For sterile, fluorescent hours, Nana Victoria was poked, prodded, and pushed through various machines that pronounced her deeply, metastatically sick. It was too late to do anything, to even cut her up into healthy, untouched pieces, to do anything but wander back home with a month’s worth of analgesics and antiemetics, changing the bedding when Nana soiled it, feeding her liquid vegetarian meals, drifting through the house glassy-eyed with shock. 

Mako missed school for a week to lie in bed with his grandmother. 

They brought the television into her room to watch  _ Coronation Street _ , Richard Simmons’  _ Dance Your Pants Off! _ , the evening news and all of the annoying infomercials that followed.

Mako took the sheep up into the hills all by himself – because they needed the exercise, because they needed the food.

When Nana Victoria stopped eating, it didn’t take long for her stop everything else, to go shivering into that valley from which she and all the other Ngatas never really returned.

Mum insisted on burying her in her everyday flannel, with no makeup to obscure her grotesque ashenness, her gruesomely blue complexion. Unlike Great-Aunt Molly, Nana Victoria was attended to by no one but her child and her child’s child, and this bothered no one. She was the second dead person Mako knew, and he could by no means handle this – could not even sleep in her house anymore, which seemed to him in Nana Victoria’s absence deeply terrifying and full of all the eldritch horrors associated with being very old and very vast.

The hungry shadows and the hostility of nighttime sounds.

The ovine eyes in the dark, searching, watching his hands wherever they roamed.

The light creeping out of the refrigerator, the electronic menagerie of bug sounds from the outside.

The loneliness that seemed to stretch out in all directions, elderly as the Earth itself.

Disappeared was the possibility of Mako growing up and into the Raukokore bulrushes – up and into real friendship and maybe even love with Harper Tangonui, up and into genuine ownership of  _ Te Whare _ , management of its wares, selling of its ice blocks. Disappeared was his Bay of Plenty children and their cohabitation with rambunctious Shorts of a second generation, their smoking of cannabis grown in backyards, their perpetual front porch existence. Disappeared was Nana Victoria from her California king; he didn’t hear or see her at all in the weeks, the months, even the years following her death – not like talkative Great-Uncle Harry, not like bossy Great-Aunt Molly.

She was gone. 

And so the world fell permanently out of place.


	23. 23

#  _ 23 _

Jeremiah Tui was born in the scariest New Zealand summer known to date. That’s how the story has been told to Mako, anyway. The way it goes, he came a little over a week before the Christmas of 1986, screeching and red and passed summarily into his father’s arms while the doctor embarked on needlework endeavors in the place where he’d nearly ripped his poor mother in two, the place where he’d burst into the world like some Klaatu alien this particular pocket of the world wasn’t prepared for, where he’d crowned, cried, and nearly suffocated on his own fluids. 

“We’ll name him after me, eh?” his father said, because this had been the plan for the past six months or so.

“No,” Lee Ann protested through her tears. She, of a possessive kind, all but snatched her newborn son out of Temuera Tui’s arms. “His name is Jeremiah. Look at him. He can’t stop crying.” 

She was right. Just as his prophetic namesake did, the baby wept and wept as if it was the end of the world and not, by his estimation, the beginning. Lee Ann, who believed in the healing properties of waterworks, held her weeping son close and pronounced him, “Jeremiah Temuera Tui.” She cut her eyes at the man who’d botched the pull-out method and managed to stick around for two out of three trimesters. “You understand, right?”

At the time, Temuera Tui was nearly all out of patience. It took a healthy dollop of what was left for him to smile at this accidental woman of his and say, “Of course. Jeremiah.”

They took Jeremiah the prophet baby home. The Gateway Motor Inn Boutique Hotel in Masterton gave them a room for fifty-three bucks a night. With the remainder of a hundred dollar bill, they purchased a fifty-pack of diapers and a scrumptious McDonald’s dinner. While Temuera Tui drove an hour and a half southwest to his personal injury law firm in Lower Hutt, Lee Ann remained in her Masterton motel with her infant the perpetual weeper during the day, attaching him to her teat when he began to sound hungry instead of simply angry, singing off-key songs from the flying elephant films of her childhood, trying to finish her abstract no. seventeen in the precious moments when Jeremiah slept, calling her parents in Mikimiki to pass on some Hanukkah cheer.

“Yes, the baby’s asleep, Mum. I put him down like thirty minutes ago. If I talk too loud, I might wake him up. No, I don’t think it’s too early. He’s a newborn. I’ve got months to regulate his sleep schedule. What do you mean I’m a procrastinator? I’m just doing things my way. Because I can, that’s why. Look, I was calling to say  _ Chag Sameach _ and ask if Papa could come and pick me up on Tuesday? Temuera has this, this big case he’s working on; he’s a little too busy to give me a ride. Well, I barely have enough money for diapers and dinner… would he accept gas money in the form of fifty-cent coins? Yeah, I’m doing laundry.  _ Yeah _ , the baby’s wearing clean clothes. I feel like sometimes you don’t trust me. You  _ don’t? _ That makes me feel great, Mum.”

The truth was, Lee Ann Apfelbaum’s mother was right to distrust her. She’d had no business having a baby, could barely take responsibility for her own existence as it was. She was a high school dropout from the Middle of Nowhere, New Zealand; a dive bar fixture perpetually knee-deep in paint and booze; an accidental kiss outside of Kuripuni Sports Bar and Tab, an accidental handjob in the backseat of a busted Pontiac from the previous year, an accidental girlfriend and then an accidental baby mama with no real home to go to and nothing even resembling money or assets. It seemed that bringing new life into the world, though entirely irresponsibly, was the first real and adult thing she’d ever done. 

Lee Ann looked at her Jeremiah and saw everything, all of it, changed permanently. She’d never needed a baby to feel like she was worth the world entire, but there was something drugging about her son’s little face and his nebulous eyes, something about looking upon him and knowing she was responsible for his being there that was simultaneously the most enchanting and the most terrifying thing she knew.

On the fourth day of Hanukkah, Lee Ann went home to Mikimiki so that her elderly mother could hold her baby boy, criticize her personal style, insist on her making her adolescent bed when she rose from a midday nap, and cook latkes for dinner. Papa fell off of the roof of the house while repairing the old leak and nearly snapped his Achilles tendon in two. On the same day, while Papa sat with his foot propped up on the coffee table, holding a tiny Jeremiah in his lap and arguing with Lee Ann about who in the family the infant resembled most, the Apfelbaum matriarch made an oil fire on the stove and, consequently, a big black circle on the ceiling. In the wake of so many small tragedies, three Jews sat outside and watched the Scottish terrier mix shit in the backyard, passing the baby back and forth, arguing.

“I still think we should take Papa to the hospital,” Lee Ann said.

“I’m not going to the hospital,” came Papa’s immediate protest. “Look. I’ve got your mum’s wheelchair from when her tailbone broke. I’ve got icepacks. I’ll be fine.”

“I went to the hospital when my tailbone broke,” Mother Apfelbaum noted as she dabbed a bit of spittle from Jeremiah’s cheek.

“Judith, I am  _ not going _ ,” Papa announced. “End of discussion.”

“I reckon you’re going to ask me to dispose of the dog’s feces,” Lee Ann speculated aloud, observing the ass-down trot of Beedle the mutt across the expanse of the backyard.

“Well, your father can’t do it with a busted ankle, now, can he?”

Jeremiah began, rather expectedly, to cry. Lee Ann reached for him, but her mother held him just out of her twiggy-armed reach.

“Gimme.”

“No, no, he’s fine. I’ve got him.”

“Well, I know he’s fine. I just want to see him.”

“Lord, but he’s a colicky thing. I wonder if he’ll have dimples. Your father has dimples, you know.”

“I know, and so does Temuera. Give him to me, Mum.”

Mother Apfelbaum would not. She held the weeping infant up by his armpits and grinned into his deeply chagrined face, asking in a voice made intentionally dopey, “Do you have dimples? Doo woo have dwimples, Jewimiah?”

“Stop talking like that and give her the baby, Judith,” Papa said. Because he was her husband and not her broke-down failure of a daughter, Mother Apfelbaum acquiesced.

“You know, you actually stunt his language development when you talk to him like an imbecile,” Lee Ann said over Jeremiah’s wailing, which had then taken on siren-like qualities not associated with his usual run of the mill crying.

“Are you calling your own mother an  _ im-be-cile? _ ” Mother Apfelbaum uttered with a gasp.

Lee Ann, wild-haired and running out of patience, bounced her son a little in her arms and replied, “ _ No _ . I said you were talking like one, not that you were one.”

“That’s awfully rude,” Mother Apfelbaum observed.

“That was rude,” echoed Papa. 

“ _ Lord have mercy _ , do we always have to do this?!” Lee Ann exploded – at her parents, at the baby, at herself, at the fucking dog that was just getting around to squeezing a healthy little turd out. She abruptly wanted to go home to the Gateway Motor Inn Boutique Hotel, to have her feet massaged by the man she didn’t know all that well and yet felt some kind of genuine love for, to eat her $0.65 hamburger and nurse her child in peace. While her mother carried Jeremiah inside the house, Papa wheeling pathetically on after her, Lee Ann picked up the dog’s shit with her hand inside of a plastic grocery bag and threw it away in the outdoor rubbish bin, gazing down the street she’d grown up on and wanting, as she’d always wanted, to run far away like a horror movie girl. 

Back in Masterton the next day, she waited at her motel for Temuera to come home with new diapers and maybe a bottle of whiskey. She, a little astounded at the changes that had taken root in her infant over the course of a mere two weeks – not least of which included the falling off of Jeremiah’s umbilical stump, which was utterly weird – danced around the room with the baby until he slept and she wanted to fall asleep as well. She felt weepy, overly sensitive, like an exposed nerve in her proneness to some kind of mysterious emotional pain. When a whole day passed and Temuera didn’t show up – didn’t answer the phone at the office nor did he attempt to contact her in any way – Lee Ann felt a stone of realization sink inside of her, felt herself say, “He’s not coming back.” She had been abandoned with her fussy Maori baby. 

Awesome.

Then there was getting a job at the Lone Star Café and Bar, where Lee Ann was allowed to keep Jeremiah in the back of the house and made friends with Syd Awatere, the guitarist for about thirty bands in Greater Wellington who said sweet things about her hair when she wore it loose.

Then there was applying for Social Security payments and depositing pathetic paychecks into her brand spanking new bank account – a novel feature of her life as an adult with a child, with bills, with needs that only she could be expected to provide for.

Then there was moving into an apartment above a real, actual family with two kids and a French poodle, sleeping on an air mattress with Jeremiah nestled in the convex curve of her body, cooking instant mac and cheese for days on end.

Then there was Jeremiah, who kept crying well into two and three and five years of age, who became “Jem” because this was less of a mouthful than his prophetic name, who was steeped in acrylic paint (Lee Ann’s preferred medium) and blackberry wine (her preferred beverage) like a fresh bag of tea, who sung sometimes in lieu of speaking.

“What do you want for breakfast, Jeremiah the doom prophet?” Lee Ann asked in the morning, overdramatic, padding after him into the shitty kitchenette in an oversized T-shirt that she used to wear when she was pregnant. “We have cereal, cereal, and cereal. That is approximately  _ it _ .”

Jem wrapped his small hands around the edge of the counter because this was a thing he could reach with minimal stretching involved. With some idea of the sarcasm entailed in his mother’s speech, he sang, “ _ Can I have cereal? _ ”

“Good choice, kid!” Lee Ann crowed, grabbing the box of Weet-Bix from the top of the refrigerator and then Jem’s favorite bowl with Peter Rabbit inside from the cabinet adjacent to the sink. Shaking out a couple of rectangles into the bowl, she asked, “Shall I make this a bit more appetizing with a banana and some honey?”

“ _ What’s ‘appetizing’? _ ”

“Good. Tasty.”

“ _ Ba-na-nas and honey, please. _ ”

He ate his breakfast while Lee Ann chipped away at her latest work: a modernist, cubist self-portrait that would sell for enough cash at the Lone Star for Lee Ann to finally get Jeremiah his own bed. Later, Syd came over to show him how to strum guitar strings to alt-folkish melodies and dance Lee Ann around the room when she began to show symptoms of wired, manic anxiety – her talking to herself, pacing about the floor at a frenetic tempo. Within the next year, Syd would die in a boating accident in the Wellington Harbour and Lee Ann would suffer through countless manic phases – not angry ones like Rui Ngata’s. Lee Ann’s mania manifested more as super expensive takeout or an outing she and Jeremiah could scarcely afford; more as spending the month’s rent on art supplies or a piece she loved and inexplicably, impossibly needed; more as unbearable anxiety that knotted her stomach and constricted the muscles in her legs so that she could not walk; more as going on dates with broke musicians and not coming back home until more than twenty-four hours later, finding Jeremiah alone in front of the television, sucked into a world of colorful characters and functional social behavior that he never had a chance to practice himself.

“How you doin’, kid?” she asked into the two o’clock afternoon living room, the expanse of boxes half-packed for their move into a new house, her still a little drunk, still a little stretched out and vacant from the act of coitus.

Jem, who felt so relentlessly alone without his mother and never had the words with which to express this aloneness, stared into and past the television and sang a three-word song: “ _ I don’t know _ .”

Into and out of many shitholes did they move. The homestead with the painter-printmaker Miriam Te Mapu-O-Te-Rangi, all of their dying aubergine and tomato plants, the dirty chickens and their unfertilized eggs. The three-bedroom bungalow with no washer/dryer unit, perpetual plumbing issues, and the rock band of six beanstalk men from Auckland who stretched their jam sessions long and deep into the night. Alison and Gideon Parents’ garage for their two weeks of homelessness, where Jem – at nine years old – slept on top of his mother because there was no room to wriggle and writhe anywhere else. Every house full of artists and musicians – crazy, sometimes aloof, admittedly childlike men and women who helped Jeremiah dress in the mornings and walked him to and from his bus stop in the mornings and afternoons, stinking of weed, singing to him. Throughout it all, all Jem wanted was a bed in which to sit and read his  _ Blackmark _ and his  _ Watchmen _ ; his Peter Rabbit bowl full of Weet-Bix, bananas, and honey; and a place that his mother would come back to in the wake of manic productivity and obsessive lovemaking, a place where she could touch her feet (the ground) and her mouth (his face). He only knew wanting. With the exception of now, it was the simplest time in his life.

Now, though. Now it is July 3 rd , the day before barbecue in the name of the country that has not quite graciously adopted them, before sleeping in late and napping throughout the afternoon, kissing slow and easy for the hell of it. In the bed that did not originally belong to him, Jeremiah Tui sits beside his betrothed, reading his  _ Watchmen _ , missing New Zealand cereal, while Mako Gehringer pumps Al Green through his MacBook’s tiny speakers and taps out the outline to an article for this month’s issue of  _ Endymion _ . New Orleans – never a quiet city by any stretch of the imagination, especially in the summer, especially at night – spreads itself around them in all directions the color of mauve and moss green, pinwheeling toward evening, toward seafood dinners eaten in neighborhood grills. Togetherness still feels good even after so many years, even after having been beaten into utter boringness and expectedness.

Having not said anything of substance for the past hour and a half, Mako opens his mouth and says, “Jem.”

Jem doesn’t look up from his graphic novel to reply, “Mako.”

“I just thought about something. I hope it isn’t strange that I’m asking you this.”

“Mako, last week you asked me to lance a boil for you. Every day with you brings some new, ridiculous question about whether or not you should have majored in modern dance at university or like, if I ate flowers, what kind of flower do I think I would like most.”

Mako cuts his eyes at Jem. “You never answered that, by the way.”

“ _ God _ , okay, roses.”

“You’re just saying that because that’s the first flower you thought of!” Mako scoffs, expelling a sharp gust of air out of the side of his mouth. “ _ Roses _ : aka the most generic flower ever. I want a serious answer!”

Jem rubs a hand over his face, breathing hard through his nose, forced to be thoughtful. He turns his book face-down over his lap and stares at the door in his contemplation. Eventually, he says, “Sunflowers. They’re yellow.”

“You like yellow food, don’t you?”

“It’s very appetizing.”

Mako and Jem stare at each other. Without words, Mako leans in to catch Jem’s lower lip with his mouth, to suck on it warmly, affectionately.

“ _ Mmnh _ ,” says Jem.

“What happened to your father?” Mako’s hand briefly goes up into the feathery mess of Jem’s hair, fingers pressing into the scalp. “You never told me that part of the story.”

Jem releases a soft laugh. “I love how you call it ‘ _ the story _ ’ like it’s some big, serious thing.”

“Jeremiah Tui: The Chronicles.”

“Come here.”

Rearranging happens. Jem dog-ears his  _ Watchmen  _ and sets it down on the nightstand while Mako saves his Word document and sets his laptop down closed at the foot of the bed. With the ease afforded by years of learning and knowing each other’s bodies, they mold themselves together in the center of the mattress, arms around each other, faces leaned close together, pulses jumping. 

“He died.” Jem wears the receptive, opened-up face of a person doing the listening rather than the telling, his glasses slid part of the way down his nose, his eyes a little lidded. “I don’t think my mum knew about it for years after it happened. She heard about it from one of his coworkers in a bar because she  _ happened _ to run into him, something like that. Really stupid.”

Mako’s fingers find the short hairs at the base of Jem’s neck, subtly telegraphing his curiosity. “How did he die, though? I mean, unless it was awful and traumatic and you don’t want to–”

“He was killed, get this, in a bar fight.”

Mako allows his mouth to fall open. “You’re kidding.”

A shake of the head. “No.” Unexpectedly (and this, to be sure, is a feat considering Mako knows Jem so well he’s come to expect just about everything he ever does), Jem’s lips curl upward at the corners and he releases a soft, snorting noise of laughter. “Apparently he was already some tragic, stupid level of drunk when he got into a fight with some Indian dude–”

“Racially motivated?”

Jem shrugs sideways. “We can only speculate. The guy literally broke his neck.”

Mako bares his teeth in an expression of twinned shock and revulsion. “ _ Yikes _ .”

“That happened when I was like two years old or something.” Humming softly, Jem hovers his face ever closer to Mako’s and closes his eyes. “Turns out a life of being a shitty person catches up to you sometimes.”

Taking somewhat perverse pleasure in the sight of Jem’s serene, unseeing face, Mako pulls his fingers around to the front of Jem’s neck, massages their tips against the Adam’s apple, the beardiness crawling down the underside of the chin. “He’s shitty because he left your mum, right?”

In an oft-rehearsed cadence inherited directly from his mother and made perhaps slightly rusty, having not been used in the approximately thousands of years since anyone in the world spoke about Temuera Tui, Jem pronounces, “He  _ never even called _ .”

Mako pushes his body into Jem’s, face in neck, kissing the skin. This is a pain they don’t often touch – not like Mako’s pain, which is the Best Actress of every single day of their relationship, front and center, a leading lady.

“Sometimes I think about what circle of Hell he’s in,” Jem says. “I mean, he sucked  _ so much _ . He was a lawyer, and an alcoholic, and he got a woman he didn’t even love pregnant just by being clumsy, then lacked the decency to grow the hell up and take care of me, his big fucking accident.”

“Second circle is lust, I think,” Mako puts in. “Third circle is gluttony. Maybe he’s somewhere between those two?”

“I hope he has a house.” There are Jem’s hands, tracing up the lean muscles of Mako’s back through his T-shirt. There is his body, shaking with soft and sad laughter. “I hope he has a demon wife and demon kids that he drives to and from school and like, cooks dinner for.”

“You just gave me the most wicked idea for a book, bro.”

Jem pulls away and gives Mako his dancingest eyes. “It’s literally wicked, too, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

The story had a happy ending, of course. Before being swallowed up (always, always) in death, there was fame and fortune and the rising out of fiscal and spiritual poverty – or, more specifically, the arrival of Scottish sculptor Jan Arbuthnot, who transformed Lee Ann from a struggling Masterton amateur living on pennies into the crème de la crème of Oceanian outsider art through her influence alone. Before the death, there were so many graphic novels in the back of Jem’s math classes and avoiding certain baked goods in the house for fear of their cannabinoid contents, learning tips and tricks of socialization from the likes of Darby Torrance (who, after breaking it off with Jem’s mother, moved to Budapest and bought a coffeehouse of which he sent many photographs). Before the death, there was middle school theatre class and Jem’s burgeoning certainty about his own needs and preferences, the arguments about Lee Ann’s manic habits that floated around spending too much money, throwing parties that lasted all through the weeknight, and basically being the child in her relationship with the boy she’d given birth to. There was Mako, there were Teasippers, there was Victoria University and doing his mother’s bank reconciliations on the weekends. 

In the mid-year winters of the early oughts, Jem and Mako lived in Lee Ann’s art hovel on Cluny Avenue, dusted the sculptures, ate pate out of the refrigerator. Gone were the days of finding cloud pictures with his mother; then, all that existed was Mako, who Jem would have leapt onto, licked, and begged like a dog to please and be pleased by. Jem used to think aloud to his mother, “Holy crap, who would have dreamed of this?” for whenever he attempted in the morning’s wee hours, stretched out in bed and alone with his thoughts, to picture the person to whom God had matched his soul, he never imagined the angry, faintly insane boy who wore impossibly busy shirts from the 1970s and a black cloud of uncombed hair atop his head, who brimmed with rage and wore his emotional garbage on his sleeve as a soldier wore medals on his chest. In fact, Jem could conjure no picture at all before Mako, no face and no warm set of hands, no flat chest, no chest whatsoever. He’s never known if his mother knew of his deviance, but the plain truth was that she did.

“It’s so funny,” was all she used to say when she was alive. “I remember a time not very long ago when you couldn’t stand this boy named Mako.”

Jem would simply shrug and go, “Things change.” And they did. And they do.

The spring of 2007 saw the first and arguably lesser of the deaths that ended the story. Seven months into their tenure with a St. Bernard puppy named Scout, Mako and Jem lost the dog to canine distemper and, in the frenzy entailed in Scout’s last days, flunked a test for their theatre tech course. Being that the Hargreaves flat had no backyard to speak of, 19 Cluny Avenue became the final resting place for the dog that had pushed Mako and Jem’s adulting skills to the very limit, that had christened both of their beds only eight times too many and revealed to them levels of patience and stupid, meaningless love they had only ever been able to dream of in the years before Scout’s time in their lives. 

While Mako and her son dug a hole through the soft grass and into the peaty soil of her backyard, Lee Ann waited with a pitcher of vodka-spiked lemonade just inside the house. She watched them lower Scout’s inert body – wrapped in one of Jem’s baby blankets that heretofore had only still existed in the house for sentimental reasons – into the cavity they’d made in the giving earth. When they came back into the house, both actively trying to stifle even the illusion of sorrow, she poured them each a glass of her cocktail and said, “Drink up, kids. Never thought you’d see the day your own mother would serve you alcohol, did you?”

With soft eyes, Mako looked at Jem, who – with eyes even softer – sipped from his vodka lemonade and said, “No, I expected it. I used to wonder if it would be a sad or a happy day when you’d do it.”

“And?” Lee Ann gestured with her own glass. “Is it a sad or a happy day?”

Jem glanced at Mako. Through the glass double doors, Mako was gazing openly, mournfully into the backyard.

“I don’t know,” Jem said. “A little bit of both.”

The second, greater death came a month later. Jem remembers the call still, the voice of one of his mother’s three boyfriends (the shy one, the one who made pottery, the one whose name he couldn’t remember) – “She fell through the skylight,” he said. “I’m sorry. It was an accident.”

“Where is she?” Jem asked. He’d done her bank reconciliation for the month; it was waiting on his desk among the scripts he and Mako were working on, among the potted silver fern, among squares of chocolate he was never going to eat. 

“I’m so sorry, mate. She’s dead.”

Just like that. No reason, no rhyme. 

Jem, who always drove, drove to the funeral. Mako wore a suit over a purple shirt that Lee Ann had once complimented and rubbed between her thumb and pointer finger. While the menagerie of creatives his mother had surrounded herself with made animalistic noises of grief and generally behaved as Lee Ann would have expected them to in the event of her death – as abandoned children, as lost and confused – Jem, the actual abandoned child, stood incredibly still and incredibly watchful over her unmoving body, over the expert restoration of broken skin and the eeriness of closed eyes. He took the lit cigarette Mako offered and he, a non-smoker, smoked with relish. Afterward, when he sat at a window seat in Kelburn Village Pub and picked at his market fish with smashed agria, asparagus, crawfish, and kaffir lime bisque, he calmly planned on everything but a public display of emotional distress until Mako looked at him in all of his funeral finery and said, “Hey, Jem?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s okay for you to cry, mate.” A soft smile; that unimagined hand on Jem’s forearm. “Don’t keep it in for me. I’ve seen uglier.”

A beat, then just as quickly and suddenly as Lee Ann died, Jem passed into hysterics. Into sniffling-snuffling-leaking-sobbing in public, into weeping openly into his fishy plate. “I wasn’t going to cry,” he said, crying.

“I’m sorry,” Mako replied, pulling his chair around to Jem’s side of the table and reaching for a hand that evaded him for fear of the scrutiny of others. “D’you want to go to the bathroom?”

“No, man, I wanna stay–” Jem hiccupped through his tears. “Wanna stay with you. We can’t leave the table.”

“Dude, fuck the table. Let’s go, okay? Listen–” To the waiter coming around with a jug of sangria: “We’re just going to nip out to the bathroom, we’re not leaving. He’s just–” Mako gestured openly to the mess that was Jem. “We’ll be right back.”

In the men’s room, Jem wept for the first time in Mako’s memory. Tears and mucus adorned Mako’s lapels and the machismo of male friendship gave way to waterlogged intimacy, to clinging to each other before urinal cakes and leaky faucets. When Jem had temporarily exhausted himself enough to lean into the side of Mako’s head with his own, sigh, and murmur, “I’m sorry,” for the misbehavior of crying, Mako simply hammered into that shop-worn refrain that most tragedies called for.

“It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

It wasn’t, and it never would be again. Sometimes saying the opposite helps. 

Ezra sends an email. Mako reads it out loud to Jem the afternoon of July 4 th , after the barbecue, the rainy afternoon, and the mutual napping of the entire household.

#    
  


**FROM:** _Ezra Gehringer <ezragehringer47@gmail.com>  
_ **TO:** _Mako Gehringer <kiwishark86@gmail.com>  
_ **SUBJECT:** _[no subject]_

Mako -- 

Good afternoon, my son. I am writing so as to maintain our good standing in each other’s lives. I would like to inform you of an interesting if not altogether unique find I have stumbled upon in my travails as a book collector and enthusiast. 

#    
  


“ _ Travails _ ,” Mako echoes, mocking.

“He’s your dad, my dude,” Jem replies.

#    
  


A Russian-language angler’s journal that fascinates itself with all aspects of fishery: the lifestyle, the methods used, hooks, lines, sinkers, floats, rods, reels, baits, lures, spears, nets, gaffs, traps, waders and tackle boxes, fishing vessels. My favorite section of the volume is concerned with the types of nets used in fishing. There is the trawl net, which is quite large, conical in shape, and designed to be towed along the sea bottom. The gillnet catches fish which try to pass through it by snagging on the gill covers. Thus trapped, the fish can neither advance through the net nor retreat. Cast nets are small round nets with weights on the edges which are thrown by the fisher. The net is thrown by hand in such a manner that it spreads out on the water and sinks, and fish are drawn into the net as it is pulled back in. Dragnet is a general term which can be applied to any net which is dragged or hauled across a river or along the bottom of a lake or sea. The drift net is a net that is not anchored, but is drifting with the current. 

#    
  


“I swear to God, what am I even reading?” Mako asks the ceiling. While Jem laughs, reaching over to rest a sympathetic hand on Mako’s upper thigh, Mako skims ahead to the next subject change and aches aloud for a cigarette – “Holy shit, I could use a smoke right now.”

#    
  


On a somewhat darker note, I have been made aware of your mother’s illness. I have some qualms with letting you know that I am upset to have not been told of this tragedy by you, but alas, I let you know nonetheless. I was under the impression that you would notify me in the event that something like this happened. I know things did not work out between your mother and I; nonetheless, I care deeply about her and her wellbeing. If this was not apparent to you before, I suppose it is apparent to you now. I express my deepest condolences to you and to her and hope that she will be restored to health soon. I know of your devotion to your mother and am aware that this must be incredibly hard on you, my son. For that, I am truly sorry. 

#    
  


“Are you okay?” Jem asks when Mako’s verbal deluge trickles to a stop. For long moments, Mako simply stares at his MacBook’s monitor, reading the words over and over again – For that, I am truly sorry, For that, I am truly sorry, For that, I am truly sorry. He hears Jem without hearing him. The nicotine gap in his brain cries out for relief. He pushes his laptop away.

“I’m going to smoke a cigarette,” he says, and then he is out of the room, down the stairs and outside, huffing Marlboro. On his phone, he reads the remainder of the email.

#    
  


Sometimes I believe I have failed you as a father. Sometimes I believe that there is so much I could have done differently for you, and that if I had done these things, you would not be so reticent to share with me. There is a simple and happy life that exists for you somewhere, Mako. That is all I wanted to give to you, but since I have not, I suppose it falls to you to find it for yourself. Again, you have my deepest apologies.

Please write back soon. I hope you are doing as well as can be expected. Give Kora my love.

\-- Dad.

#    
  


There is a part of Mako that aches with the desire to do something like cry, maybe, or express his current tangle of emotions (sorrow/regret/resentment/exhaustion) in a way China might consider healthy and productive. He doesn’t cry. He lights up a second Marlboro with the iridescent Zippo Jem bought for him six months ago at the Family Dollar on St. Claude, and as he inhales the carcinogenic vapor, he feels touched all over his face and his insides by the smoke, by the hot and heavy Crescent City air, by his father. Looking all around himself at Mum’s untended garden and the cloud-dotted gradient of the sky, he feels shaken in a way that refuses to be defined by the inadequacy of words, that jingles around him like loose change in a deep pocket. He knows the feeling won’t last, but in the midst of it, he is exhilarated enough to stand up on the tips of his naked toes and yell at the top of his lungs – “ _ Aaauugh! _ ” – not happy, not sad, but a feeling, breathing being in the world.

A voice comes from somewhere outside the gate. “You okay, bruh?”

Mako blinks, then speaks in the direction of that faceless voice. “I’m making it, man.”

“It be that way sometimes,” the voice says. Mako nods, finishes his cigarette, and goes back inside.

That night, he and his mother make a grocery list based on Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor’s musings on liver and onions (to which Mako, admittedly, makes the nastiest, tonguiest of faces at upon hearing about it), mountain oysters, pancakes, pound cake, red rice, Harriet Tubman ragout, and coconut custard pie.  _ Forensic Files _ is on the tube – Kory having retreated up to her room after dinner to play a video game with a bubblegum soundtrack and Jem in the upstairs shower, singing Sinatra – and while sitting together on the sofa fighting over where to go to buy their oysters – 

“Rouses should be fine, Mum.” 

“Rouses?!  _ Pah! _ You’ve gotta go to an actual market, a real fishmonger.” 

“Where the hell am I supposed to find a goddamn fishmonger?” 

“ _ You’re _ the one with the map on your phone.”

– Mako and Mum watch the thirty-minute documentary on an unidentified pair of severed hands and their unfortunately murdered owner, a jazz musician in Greenville, South Carolina.

“Oh my God,” Mako says about sixteen minutes in, leaning all the way back against the couch cushions and fighting the smile that begs to unfold across his face.

“What?” Mum asks, flipping through her cookbook and jotting down “pie shell” and “vanilla extract” at the bottom of their list.

“You heard that? He was a jazz musician.” Mako shakes his hands in the air before him, emphatically, rhythmically. “His hands were jazzy. Jazz hands.”

Mum’s arm comes up to crack hard against his shoulder, pulling out of him a high-pitched, “ _ Ouch! _ ” She shakes her head.

“You need to have more respect for the dead.”

“I respect the dead just fine. I’m just saying, he literally had jazz hands.” 

“Your poor Nan would be turning in her grave if she could hear you talking like that.”

“Yeah, she’d be turning  _ with laughter _ .” Mako stretches his arms over his head and his legs straight out in front of him, his thighs taut beneath the maroon mesh that constitutes his gym shorts, bare feet reaching with some strain in the direction of the television. He waits until his bones begin to pop – vertebrae cracking satisfyingly against each other, knees snapping gently in their sockets – then goes limp against the sofa and against Mum, his head a heavy weight against the broadness of her elephantine shoulder. “I’m tired,” he says, apropos of nothing.

“Did you take your medicine today?” Mum asks. Mako makes a soft, irritated little sound with his teeth and tongue –  _ tch! _

“I’m an adult, Mum.”

“That’s not the answer to my question,” she retorts, always machete-sharp in her manner.

“Yeah, I took my medicine.” Mako shifts with Mum, settling in warmly against her side as she brings her arm up and around to drape across his shoulders. “I’m tired because I’ve been up since seven this morning. I’m tired because I have a neurochemical disorder that fucks with my serotonin and melatonin levels. I’m tired because my life sucks.”

“Your life doesn’t suck.”

“You’re right, it doesn’t. I was just being dramatic.” Mum moves her hand to card her fingers through his curls, and the sensation of fingertips against his scalp, rubbing at his sensitive skin in small, gentle circles, brings him to a quiet place that lived only in his childhood.

“You want to know what it’s like to have your life suck?” She palms demonstratively at the meager flesh that constitutes her chest now, then winces. “Have a double mastectomy and a broken hip and live daily with the possibility of your impending demise. Experience all five stages of grief not in clean, consecutive fashion, but all at once, all the time. Talk about this to no one.” She pats Mako’s head. “ _ That’s _ a sucking life.”

“Wouldn’t it be  _ sucky _ instead of  _ sucking _ ?” Mako asks, allergic to even the prospect of a serious conversation.

“What’s the difference?” Mum’s hand goes flat and warm against his head. “Come help me get in the bathtub, Mako.”

To the downstairs bathroom they go. Knowing Jem’s showers often run cold, they have no qualms with filling the tub with hot water and, at Mako’s playful insistence, lavender-scented bubble bath. In what may easily count as the strangest moment of his week, Mako watches his mother undress and takes in, for the first time in so many years, the spectacle of her nudity – the new and grotesque mastectomy scars smiling across her chest; the ripple of stretch marks, of cellulite; the swell of a Willendorf Venus stomach. As Mum braces herself against him and he lowers her into the bathtub as he would a bucket into a well, Mum emits a long noise of discomfort, yelling, “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” into the steamy bathroom air.

“Do you want me to get your Oxy?” Mako asks halfway through the descent.

“No, I’ll live,” Mum announces. The instant her bottom touches the floor of the tub, she releases a sigh of gale force and shudders. 

Mako sits on the toilet. Watches Mum grasp at the bathtub’s ceramic lip, her baby elephant’s body slosh around in hot water, her slow-blinking eyes open and close. Once Mum has situated herself and begun to work her sliver of pale soap into the folds of a loofah, she gives him a somewhat noncommittal glance and says, “You can leave now.”

Mako clears his throat. “I’d rather not.”

“I’m not going to need your help again until I’m done.”

“Can I just stay with you until then?” He doesn’t say that he doesn’t know how long he will have this. He doesn’t say that he’s missed her since the appointment with Dr. Arulpragasam – the words simply refuse to come. 

Mum scours her loofah into the hairless skin of her right armpit and affects a thoughtful expression. “You have to talk to me,” she says. “Otherwise it’s just you creepily watching me bathe.”

So Mako talks.

“I was wondering – don’t get mad – I was wondering if you possibly wanted to do a pre-need.”

“I really can’t believe I don’t know something that you know.” Mum snorts, scouring at her chest and cringing at the pain all the while. “What’s a pre-need?”

“It’s like… when you plan and pay for a funeral before the person’s death.” Saying the words is like wrenching the teeth from his mouth; smiling bloody, Mako scrambles for more, easier words. “It’s just to make things simpler, you know. For the person who’s dying. Not that you’re dying or anything, I’m just saying–”

“Oh, Mako, quit it.” Mum’s eyes – that have grown so eerily quiet and calm since it became apparent that her number was rapidly, almost certainly becoming up - flicker over to Mako with a touch of their former salt and pepper. Mum lowers her loofah into the bathwater and begins to scrub unashamedly at the prominence of her stomach and the rippled skin just above her groin. “Let’s not dance around it anymore. I’ll be lucky if I make it to the end of the year.”

This admission coming from her, very expectedly, makes Mako feel as though his eyeballs are going to pop out. They don’t, though. They stay firmly put and don’t even have the audacity to become shiny and wet with grief as he frowns like an idiot and says, “I thought you said you weren’t dying.”

“Five stages of grief,” Mum snorts. She groans like an old chair, cleaning the hip that broke. “First stage: denial. Second stage: anger-”

“You’ve been in that stage your whole life.”

The look on Mum’s face is not infuriated, not exhausted, but something between and entirely removed from either emotion. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t feel like talking about this,” Mako says with a sort of startling abruptness, not lying. Suddenly very tired of the pain spidering radially outwards in Mum’s every face and movement, he stands from the toilet and goes to the medicine cabinet. “I’m getting your Oxy.”

“Goddammit, Mako, sit your arse down and hand me a flannel!”

It is so like her that Mako starts crying and laughing at the same time. He grabs a washcloth from the towel rod beneath the window and ignores Mum’s look of faintly enraged confusion as he passes it to her. 

Silence creeps in, mediated by the quietness of bathwater splashing and the very distant sound of the television in the living room, by water dripping out of the bathtub faucet and snot being pulled upward through nasal cavities. Mako dabs at his tears with a couple of squares of toilet paper - feeling stupider than he has ever felt in his life, perhaps, stupid for crying where his mother can see him, stupid for revealing to her the depths of his emotional immaturity in his thirty-eigth year of life - while Mum pushes her washcloth around her hairless face and head, eyes closed. Enough time passes for the content of their conversation to slip away as if into some hidden oubliette, time enough for it to be utterly confusing when Mum sinks her washcloth down into the water and announces, “I want to sit with it, by myself. I want to deal with it with you at my side.”

Mako blinks. “What are you talking about?”

“The pain.” Mum goes back to the loofah and attempts to reach over and behind her right shoulder, to no avail. “I don’t want Oxy,” she says. “I want you.”

Mako is profoundly saddened. “I can’t relieve your pain.”

“I know.” She reaches out for him with the loofah hand. “Can you wash my back, baby?”

Mako kneels on the tile beside the bathtub and scrubs soapy water into his mother’s back, biting his lip, blinking away tears. 

“Let’s do a, a, what did you call it? A pre-need.” Mum releases a sigh that signals the return of her calm fatigue, the retreat of the flash of anger from before. “Might as well get all the nasty planning over with. I haven’t thought much about my funeral, you know. Oh, all the minutiae. The only people there will be the three of you, so I don’t see the point in going too fancy. All I ask for are nice flowers. Are tiger lilies appropriate for a funeral? I don’t care - I want them anyway.” Without warning, Mum stops talking and looks over her shoulder at her son, fixing him with a probing look. “What are you thinking about?” she asks. “You’re so quiet.”

“I’m thinking about what it’s going to be like.”

“What do you mean?”

“When you’re gone.”

“Oh, you’ll be happier.” Mum flaps a dismissive hand in the air. “Contrary to popular opinion, I know how you feel about me, Mako. I know. You’ll be happier without me here-”

“Okay, that’s so not true and that’s so not fair!” As anticipated by no one (or, possibly, everyone who has ever known the insane toing and froing of Mako’s emotional state), Mako is suddenly a screeching, defensive, crazed thing that is on his knees in front of his mother, his eyes blown out like saucers, wet again, black as sin. There is the distinct sound of water rush-roaring somewhere, but he can’t figure out where it’s coming from until all at once, he realizes that it’s just in his head. “Without you I’m going to be broken, okay? Done! I’ll be like a ship in the middle of the ocean with no anchor and no crew, and  _ no _ I will not be happier, and  _ no _ I will not be okay, like, ever again, ever.”

“Why are you talking like you won’t have Jeremiah and Kora?” Mum asks, looking tired and not altogether impressed with Mako’s fervor.

“Because! Mum! You’re my only one and I’m your only one! Remember when you broke your hip and you said that?”

“Baby, I was on drugs.”

“But you weren’t lying!” With a hand already soaked by bathwater, Mako scrubs uselessly at his eyes and noisily inhales nothing but snot. “You were telling the truth for once in my whole goddamn life, and Jem and Kory matter more than anything, but you’re my fucking mommy and nothing’s ever going to change what we have!” Exhausted by his outburst, Mako  _ thunks  _ his head down against the side of the bathtub and sobs, both because of Mum and because the collision of cranium and porcelain plain fucking hurts. 

There is a pregnant moment in which Mum says nothing, just, ostensibly, watches Mako cry. Then, possibly inspired by her impending death - the inevitability of never being able to do it again - she puts a wet hand into the cloud of Mako’s hair and murmurs, “I know.” And she does know. “I understand.” And she does understand.

He helps her out of the tub. The moaning and the hissing. Into an old muumuu and bed, where he lies curled around her and cries until he can’t cry anymore and holds her bald head, kisses it, loves it. Then he asks her, wiping snot away with the short sleeve of his T-shirt, “Do you think I made a mistake? Coming to New Orleans?”

Mum releases a sound that’s kind of like a snort and kind of like a sigh at the same time. “Do you think I would have come with you if I thought you were making a mistake?”

“Yeah, but you made that decision before we were here. Now we’re here, and I’m like… taking care of you-”

“I think we’re taking care of each other, Mako.” Mum reaches for the remote control on the nightstand and begins to idly scroll through the channels on television, her eyes sort of glazed over like she’s not seeing anything at all. “Don’t think I’m not keeping track of every breakfast cooked and every cuppa brewed,  _ tamaiti _ .”

“So you can lord it over me on your deathbed?” Mako laughs. “‘ _ I made coffee for you one-thousand, two-hundred, and thirty-six times, Mako, and this is how you treat me?! _ ’”

“Of course, kiddo.”

A beat. Mako tucks his mouth into the place behind Mum’s ear and repeats his question in truncated form - “Do you think we made a mistake?”

“No.” Mum has a way of instant certainty about her.

Another beat. Mako nuzzles soft skin, lowers his voice into its most delicate register. “Are you happy?”

“Right now?” No hesitation. “Yes.”

This surprises Mako, but not very much. “What about in general?”

“That question doesn’t even make sense.”

“It doesn’t?”

“No.” Mum doesn’t explain.

They end up on  _ Naked and Afraid _ on the Discovery Channel. Mum’s breathing slows until it is nearly slumberlike. Mako keeps talking, saying things like, “What would it be like to have a complete human experience that encompasses the entirety of humanity, of all personality traits and types and cultures? How long would you have to live? How long would your childhood be? Your adolescence? Your adulthood? Your old age? I wonder if it would even be psychologically possible to live all of humanity in one single life, just because of like, language development and the way memory works. When you’re a baby you’re so plastic, but as you grow up your knowledge and memory becomes more and more crystallized to the point where other, like, cultural ways of thinking can’t break in. If it were possible to be a  _ tabula rasa _ your whole life, I’m sure you could be nurtured in every way there is possible to be nurtured. But our minds don’t work like that. Maybe that’s why we’re so unhappy.”

Eventually, a foghornesque noise escapes from Mum’s mouth and Mako knows it is time to leave. Disentangling himself from her body, he prepares to climb out of bed and, disturbing her nascent slumber, finds his hand in hers, being brought up to her lips.

Sleepily: “Goodnight, my love.”

He abruptly feels nine years old. “Goodnight, Mum.”


	24. 24

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> y'all FINALLY get a proper appearance of the australian beefcake here  
> idk how i feel about this chapter it took me so long to write it
> 
> also wow! there's a brief but graphic description of abusive adult/minor sex as well as descriptions of physical abuse between family members in this chapter so proceed with caution

#  _ 24 _

Late July chugs in like the slowest train of them all, accompanied by casually triple-digit temperatures. Through it all, there are popsicles and the sexual innuendo that comes with them after childhood has passed into gross, suggestive adulthood. Sitting out on the patio on Sunday the 20 th , sweating profusely under a mid-afternoon sun and the Carolina blue that surrounds it, Mako and Jem trade glances while the former sucks on a lemon-flavored ice pop. Jem looks hungry. Mako mostly just looks hot. 

“Mako.”

“Jem.”

Jem shifts his gaze momentarily to Mum’s garden, his mouth open and no sound escaping. When he returns his eyes to Mako, they are hungrier than before. “You look… really good,” he says, dumbly.

Mako narrows his eyes and pushes his bandana higher up on his head. “I’m not putting anything warmer than this in my mouth, mate. You can forget it.”

“Oh, you don’t have to do the, the uh… mouth stuff.” Jem is laughing and he looks dead serious at the same time, somehow. “You’re just very…” He watches the yellow phallus slide in and out of Mako’s mouth. “Evocative.”

“ _ Pro _ vocative?”

“Take a little of both, I’m feeling generous.”

Right on cue, Mako snaps the tip of the popsicle off between his teeth. Jem, undeterred, reaches across the space between their chairs to put his hot hand on Mako’s naked, furry stomach, and okay - this makes sense. This feels good. When they go back inside, it’s straight upstairs and straight into the bedroom, and there is a swift migration toward the mess of the unmade bed, and Mako’s gym shorts are coming off so Jem can sink his head between his legs and suck him to the sound of the electric fan, and oh.

To think they spent years denying themselves this. 

To think they spent years denying themselves the pleasure of having Mako on his back, lazily singing some shit like “Afternoon Delight” in the ceiling’s general direction, mouthy as always, talking bullshit, while Jem rolls their hips together to a thoroughly unhurried, unheard rhythm, hitting the sweetest spot inside and laughing - always laughing - when Mako says something silly.

“ _ Skyrockets in flight… _ ”

“Oh my God, shut up.”

“ _ Afternoon delight…! _ ”

“I’m going to eat your eyes.”

Mako props himself up on his elbows, grinning like the Devil. “Do it.”

Jem buries himself to the hilt and heaves himself forward - Mako groaning out in pleasure, guts going all tight in the abdomen - to press his lips to Mako’s eyelids until they’re both giggling like children, rolling around the bed, sweaty and giddy and not even a little passionate, just wholly enamored with each other.

In the aftermath, Mako lies on top of Jem and tries to go to sleep. The heat sits atop them as a dense, crushing, geophysical force.

“I can’t feel my arm,” Mako announces. Jem moves the arm hooked around the back of his neck to press a palm to his mouth, impeding further speech. Mako allows this for three minutes and six seconds, then raises his head and says once more, this time to Jem’s face, “I can’t feel my arm.”

“Shh.”

“I’m going to move.”

“Mmnh.”

For Mako, no sleep is had this afternoon. Jem, the asshole, slumbers through anything, even 102-degree warmth.

It’s time for a shop. Kory keeps looking vaguely pleadingly at Mako every time they’re in the kitchen together, trawling through the fridge full of slightly too old leftovers and nearly empty juice bottles. Mako, for once in probably forever, elects to make the trip to Whole Foods alone, feeling both brave and unwilling to deal with all the hoopla that shopping with the family entails (the waiting, the beseeching, the idle conversation that sometimes makes him want to eat a shotgun). He peruses cucumbers, lettuce heads, tomatoes, and spinach alone. He watches the deli clerk slice his salami and bag his fresh shrimp alone. He examines guacamole and sea salt grain free tortilla chips and hummus and Simply Naked pita chips alone. He wanders into the dairy aisle, seeking organic whole milk, alone.

He has his hand on a 128-ounce jug when he feels eyes on him; looks up and slightly to the left and finds himself suddenly drowned in familiar and electrifying blue. 

There he is, the Australian brick shithouse himself. Wearing the sweatpants Mako used to wear in bed, a mask, and his hair as long as it was when they first met; all filled out and sinuously massive like some kind of golden, elaborately tattooed jungle cat; Cassidy stares at Mako with eyes that fix him to the spot like a brass pin in a dead butterfly. All Mako can do is rotate around that pin, flail wildly and entirely internally as Cassidy takes the one, two, five steps it takes to stand a polite two feet away from him in the middle of the aisle. 

“Hey,” says Cassidy. Mako swallows a whole mouthful of saliva, is faintly surprised to see the floor caved in and his heart lodged in the crater’s nadir.

“Hi.” He manages not to croak, but only barely. Unthinkingly, he pulls his mask away from his face.

“I saw you.”

“Obviously.” This sounds sarcastic and even a little glib; Mako counts that as a victory.

“No, no.” Cassidy’s face puckers a little the way it does when he’s frustrated at his own verbal and/or emotional retardation, and it’s oh so beguiling, oh so infuriating. “I mean before. Last year, around Christmastime, I was walking to my car on Magazine and I saw you in a shop.”

“Oh.” Mako tries and fails to remember when the hell he was shopping on Magazine during Yuletide 2024. “Oh, wow, well. I guess I saw you, too. Before that, though. You were in your shop.”

“Yeah,” is all Cassidy manages in reply.

“Yeah,” Mako echoes - not because he has nothing else to say, but because his brain runs like an egg in the pan of his skull. 

Then they are standing there, looking at the floor between each other’s feet. Mako, for his part, feels profoundly cheated by the universe at the moment; though they haven’t run into each other very often since the tragic autumn of 2017, when they have, he has always had the fortune of spotting Cassidy before he himself is spotted, which has given him the opportunity to run away and avoid this - this awkward staring, heart-on-floor, what to say kind of bullshit. 

Eventually, Cassidy clears his throat a little - drawing Mako’s eyes back into his perfect, perfect face - and says, “Well… how are you?”

Mako cannot stay the kneejerk, TMI response. “Horrible. My mum has cancer.”

Cassidy, pulling his mask off, has the nerve to look genuinely upset - puppy dog eyes round and big like nothing else in the world, mouth almost pouty with the frown that overtakes it. “Oh, shit, mate.”

“It’s actually not all that bad,” Mako lies, feeling stupid for having been so honest with this person he hasn’t talked to in eight fucking years. “Horrible is just my go-to word whenever I get that question. I’m blowing things up, you know, focusing on the negative.”

“There’s a bipolar brain for you.”

A featureless woman passes by their conversation right at that moment and Mako wants to laugh at the absurdity, the inanity. “Yeah, exactly,” he says instead. “But no, I’m… cancer eats everything and I’m just waiting, you know. For Mum to die. That’s all.” He coughs, the tickle in the back of his throat atrocious and somatoform. “How are you?”

At the shift in focus, Cassidy predictably begins to retreat into himself in a way that is only perceptible to Mako because he spent months learning him in possibly the most intimate way there is to be learned. Glancing at Mako’s shoulder - not his eyes - Cassidy replies in a quieter voice than the one he was using before, “You know… making it.”

Mako is abruptly accosted by visions of needles and tablespoons, white powder on mirror trays. “That bad, huh?”

“You know how it is.” Cassidy produces a bitter smile. “Same old, same old. One day at a time.”

“Yeah.”

Almost too characteristically, Cassidy ends this part of the conversation as quickly as it began. “How’s Kory?” he asks, looking much more comfortable pronouncing these words. “She’d be, what - fourteen now?”

“She’s fifteen.” Mako allows himself to swim briefly in the happy pool of Kory, of thinking about her, of joyfully talking about her. “She’s dealing with this cancer thing too, so you know, it’s… there have been some pretty rough days, but she’s doing okay on the whole.”

“That’s great.” For the first time since they started talking, Cassidy smiles his dumb, beautiful smile, and through the Kory haze, Mako wants to die so bad. “She’s a great kid.”

“Yeah, she’s my whole life.” Mako looks at his hands. “I love her.”

“I remember.” Mako idly wonders why Cassidy is so confident all of a sudden when, for reasons that swiftly become apparent, a look smacking of boyish timidity overcomes him. Cassidy smiles shyly, bites the inside of his lips, then asks, “Are you, uh... are you seeing anyone?”

Hahaha. Mako is so tickled he could disappear into the floor, sobbing with laughter, and never return to any place oxygenated and real again. Somehow, he makes words happen.

“Yeah, actually, I’m, um… engaged.”

For some reason, this broadens Cassidy’s smile. Mako realizes that he’s never expected Cassidy to be happy for him in any unselfish way, and this makes him so sad that he almost forgets to school his expression and frowns. 

“Engaged,” Cassidy echoes. “Wow, okay.” His face goes sly and mischievous. “To a woman?”

“ _ No _ .” Mako is surprised by the vehemence of this word. He reminds himself to calm his very bisexual ass down. “It’s Jem. You remember him, right?”

“Yeah, I do.” In a way that is absolutely mystifying, considering everything, Cassidy stays looking pleased and kind of impish and, more than anything, satisfied with the course Mako’s life has taken. “I guess things finally came together.”

“They did.”

“Well, good for you.” It is very clear that Cassidy means this; he’s looking at Mako’s eyes. “I guess that means you’re happy.”

Because Mako doesn’t know how to lie unless he’s trying to protect himself, he says, “I don’t know if that’s the word.” Finally, Cassidy’s face changes and he gives Mako a strange look, brow furrowed, head cocking backwards a little bit in confusion. Mako shrugs and starts to go into the diatribe: “I know, it’s weird, I don’t make any sense-”

“You’re still you,” Cassidy interjects, and well. That just about kills Mako on the spot.

For a long, fairly arresting moment, Mako and Cassidy actually watch each other instead of deferring to the floor or some nonthreatening body part. Mako allows himself to notice that Cassidy has acquired a faintly lined face in the years since they’ve been able to closely examine each other; that Cassidy has traded in some of that ridiculously sexy muscle mass for soft teddy bear fat; that Cassidy is wearing shadows beneath his eyes (which isn’t new) and a yellow gold crab pendant around his neck (which is); that he has not quite fallen out of love with Cassidy, that he is still excited and nervous in the manner of a little boy in the other’s presence. He doesn’t know what Cassidy catalogues about him in the time they spend watching each other, but whatever it is, it must be pleasing, because there Cassidy is, sort of melting into another breathtaking, beautiful smile. 

Abruptly, Mako becomes aware of the passage of time, which has always, always flowed funnily between them. He blinks himself into clarity. “What about you?” he asks. “Are you? Seeing anyone?”

“ _ God _ , no.  _ Fuck _ no.” Cassidy releases a chuckle. “If I was, I don’t think New Orleans would be able to take it. We’d be in the 200s. Global warming would just hurry up and shit all over the city. The Mississippi would fuckin’ drown us all. Really, really -  _ no _ .”

Mako’s responding laugh is helpless and genuine, a little wet around the eyes. The fingers of his right hand slowly retract themselves to curl up into his palms and drum lightly against the handle of his grocery basket, and in the midst of his and Cassidy’s old, familiar vulgarity – full of the constant self-deprecation and references to the hysterical, often painful world they live in – he’s hit with a breathtaking, unmedicated tenderness that threatens to blow him to bits, just being so close to Cassidy and the dangerous, once upon a time kind of love of theirs.

“Are you happy?” he hears himself ask, inspired by his sudden softness.

Cassidy grins. The whole world disappears into those teeth. “Not really, no,” he says. “But I’ll live.”

“I feel you.” This is all Mako has ever done where Cassidy is concerned. “Listen, uh…” Pulling his phone out of his back pocket, checking the time - 4:34, yikes - “I have to go. Kory’s at a friend’s house and she’s expecting me to pick her up in half an hour, I’m just, you know, running a quick-”

“Yeah, yeah, of course. Don’t let me keep you.” Already stepping backwards, retreating in the direction in which he came, Cassidy lingers his gaze on Mako’s face, looks at him the way he used to when they first met - as if Mako is the most perfect thing there ever was. “It was good to see you.”

Mako doesn’t know if he’s lying when he replies, “Yeah, you too.” He starts to turn away, back to the milk he was picking out, when Cassidy shocks the shit out of him and says, get this, the worst possible thing.

“I’m really sorry… about your mum.”

Mako whips back around to gape at his lost love, mouth opening and closing like a fish’s. Somehow, he manages to find something to say, and it feels right, feels truthful.

“Don’t be. Shit happens.”

In the parking lot, Mako frantically extracts his phone from his pocket and searches through his iMessages for someone to yell at. Jem would make the most sense, him being the omniscient arbiter of Mako’s whole life. Mako detours to the group chat with KC and Godfrey instead.

#    
  


**Today** 4:49 PM

**mako gehringer  
** I JUST RAN INTO CASSIDY, AS IN, CASSIDY VILLIERS, AS IN, THE PERSON I KIND OF FELL IN LOVE WITH EIGHT YEARS AGO

**kc ramsey  
** UMMMMMM!!!!!??????

I NEED DEETS

**mako gehringer  
** literally nothing happened we just made small talk and i told him my fucking mum has cancer for some reason because i can’t lie to the man that like, redefined sexuality for me for the rest of my life

but ohhhhh my god kc he like. he’s pudgier. remember how he used to be just like a wall of muscle?? now he’s like a bear and i’m….. feeling things…….

**kc ramsey  
** nigga you gotta be more specific than “i’m  feeling things”

SPILL SPILL SPILL

you know this is a safe space :)

**mako gehringer  
** i

want to get under that. the pudginess i mean

i swear to god i was in the checkout line having a motherfucking ptsd flashback to every time we fucked and i feel so bad like

i’m so happy with jem why WHY am i thinking about HAVING THE SEX with cassidy villiers

**godfrey yen  
** Because you ran into him duh

(Yes my babies I am here, lurking)

**mako gehringer  
** and it wasn’t just every time we fucked either like i also kept thinking about like watching him sleep and walking his dog with him

everything was sex with him. even the things that weren’t sexy at all

i’m THIRTY EIGHT i’m too damn old for this

**kc ramsey  
** mako. mako. listen.

first of all BIG YIKES that you had to go through  this on this day. i appreciate and acknowledge the  hardness of this

second of all its okay that you’re feeling all of these  things. you were in love and if you’re the kind of  person i think

no the kind of person i KNOW you are

those feelings are never going to neatly slip away  and that makes you beautiful. you’re not cheating  on jem you’re not committing a thoughtcrime, it’s  okay

we love you <3

**godfrey yen  
** Everything she said

It’s moments like this I’m so proud to have married  you my darling wench

**kc ramsey  
** he’s just saying that so i suck his dick later lmao

**mako gehringer  
** retweet

**godfrey yen  
** I’m IN LOVE with you Mako Gehringer

#    
  


Sighing, barely keeping himself from launching his head directly into his steering wheel, Mako throws his phone into the cupholder and heads for Mid-City, where Kory is. After getting his daughter and Jem to put away the groceries at home, he goes upstairs with an empty grocery bag and starts to put Cassidy’s things away. No more sleeping in his clothes. No more looking through photos on his Camera Roll that are now definitively old as sin. No more holding on to someone else’s varied and assorted paraphernalia - tarnished rings and chain necklaces, Sticky Notes adorned with Cassidy’s right-leaning scrawl, a heavily dog-eared copy of  _ Invisible Monsters _ , Cassidy’s hot pink earbuds. Because he doesn’t want to just throw all of it away (especially the book, God forbid the book), Mako leaves the filled bag in the Goodwill pile at the top of the stairs, and he thinks again of how Cassidy said it - “I’m really sorry about your mum.”

Cassidy would understand this pain more than anyone Mako knows. 

He grew up in a small, coastal town in southern Australia named Ocean Grove - not frolicking amongst sheep and goats as Mako did in Raukokore, but surfing and fishing and beachcombing along with his family of moderate size and Huguenot ancestry:

Jonathan Villiers, a Melbourne legend, who despised his boyhood home of Ocean Grove as he despised many things, among them human error and wasted food; who reigned supreme in the household with a trusty pair of jumper cables and a wolfish tendency to go for the jugular in any fight or disagreement; who spent the majority of his waking hours in a fishing boat on the Bass Strait; who ended a ten-year career in the glitziest kitchens on the coast in all of thirty seconds when, disagreeing with a line cook on the proper preparation of seafood soup with ginger and yuzu kosho, he deliberately overturned a pan of hot oil onto said chef’s forearms and pronounced a stream of expletives so violent the Earth could have cracked beneath their force. 

Shelly Villiers, a dishwater blonde who fished for snapper, flathead, whiting, and bream at her disgraced husband’s side; who painted the houses of Ocean Grove colors of cornflower blue and misty rose and tea green and cosmic latte; who slept sometimes for upwards of eighteen hours in the bed in which she’d given birth to all three of her children, her distinguishable from a corpse only by virtue of her pulse and the shallow, cloudlike breaths that escaped from a mouth set ajar; who shivered, shivered, shivered perpetually, a leaf caught in a snapping wind, a human glitch.

Catherine Villiers, who mostly went by the diminutive Cat and was beaten black and blue in her fourteenth year for cutting all her hair off with the kitchen scissors (both because this damaged the scissors and because, by her father’s estimation, there’d be “no dykes under this roof”); who surfed with Cassidy in the early mornings and evenings with a sort of wired-tired, strong-bodied capability that suggested an almost amphibian nature; who was her brother’s vitriolic best bud in their developmental years, running out of the bathroom to swab dirty tampons on the inside of his hands, punching him in the face and uttering manlike “I love you”s in the same breath; who eventually overtook her mother’s house-painting enterprise and utilized better, brighter colors such as cyclamen and byzantium. 

Baby Charley Villiers, who rode around the house on Cassidy’s back from the ages zero to fourteen; who snatched starfish off of the beach and sliced into their thick dermis with Jonathan’s chef’s knife (which, yeah, that was a whipping right there); who was a prophet with robin egg eyes, could foresee more than any other family member the wretched demise that would slowly and excruciatingly engulf their quintet as the years passed; who became an intensivist in Melbourne in adulthood and, though entertaining thoughts of never returning to Ocean Grove again, came back home with a sort of clockwork regularity that made apparent the obligatory nature of his visits, him never wanting them, but needing them.

Then, of course, Cassidy: the shark, the Adonis, the sweetest heart in Victoria. 

Once, Cassidy said to Mako that his earliest memory was of eating raw oysters with his sister and his father, sitting at the island in the kitchen and being made to taste crude ingredients - paprika, tobiko, yuzu juice, and the oysters. Jonathan sprinkled horseradish, lemon juice, and hot sauce into each brownish-gray boat and showed his children how to slurp the seasoned flesh right out of the shell, and really, while Cassidy found this to be thoroughly disgusting, he was too much in love with the way he and Cat were being looked at by their father to be honest about this. He consumed his oysters with relish.

Once, Cassidy contradicted himself and told Mako that his earliest memory was of the beach, of horseplaying with Cat where the sea swelled dangerously while his mother - who had not yet begun to quake like the Earth - held Baby Charley in her arms much closer to the shore and yelled at them to, “Come back! I can’t save you out there!” Pushing himself through the water like some great golden fish, hair in his eyes, Cat’s laughter omnipresent. Dunking his sister into the water, hugging her beneath its surface, kissing her. Then there was the agonizing, anaphylactic burning in his right leg and the 80 kph car ride to the hospital, and his mother and siblings all clinging to him like sea kelp as the doctor’s gloved hands carefully removed the jellyfish tentacle from his shin, Shelly promising Cassidy and God everything in the world if only Cassidy lived through it.

Once, Cassidy contradicted himself again and told Mako that his earliest memory was of running through the beachside bungalow with a glass of orange juice that spilled itself all over the floor with his every movement, and him laughing, and him yelling, and him a little boy behaving the way all little boys behaved. This wasn’t significant. He didn’t really remember the running, the laughing, the yelling, or the spilling. He remembered what came after, the crack of a closed fist against his face that was so powerful it felt as though it would literally split his five year old head open. What did Jonathan say then?

“‘ _ Don’t you ever run in my house again _ ,’” Cassidy repeated into the small space that existed between him and Mako at the time of the story’s recounting. Mako touched Cassidy’s face, then leaned in and kissed him. This memory, he believed, was truthfully the oldest one.

Cassidy’s childhood and adolescence - which, considering the nature of Ocean Grove, should have been a peaceful, phlegmatic affair - was marred from the beginning by his parents’ mutual abuse of alcoholic substances. Sometimes, after the onset of the shivering, Shelly would slip into bed in the middle of the day and almost cease to exist. The kids, thinking her dead, would climb onto her body and cry out, “She’s gone. She’s gone!” until the eventual entrance of the Evil King and his supremely effective method of waking the dead: shooing the kids away so that they scattered like mice into the corners of the room, yanking his wife up by the collar of her nightgown, and slapping the woman hard enough to bruise. 

“Wake up, you lazy bitch! Take care of your fuckin’ kids!”

Shelly laid in bed for five more minutes, idly rubbing her face as if it was an object of casual interest instead of the thing that had just been beaten. She eventually rose from the bed; looked at Cat, Cassidy, and Baby Charley where they crouched in the bedroom’s various corners; drifted into the kitchen; and poured herself a highball full to brimming of Johnnie Walker Gold Label.

“Come tell me something funny!” she yelled to her children, the directive general at first, then - “Cassidy!” - because her middle child was the funniest of them all.

It is of Shelly that Mako knows most. Sometimes, when his hands would tremble with anxiety around cigarettes and eating utensils, Cassidy would look at him and say, “Stop shaking,” Sometimes, when he would braid Cassidy’s hair into a long flaxen rope down the man’s back, Cassidy would sigh and mumble something like, “My mum used to do this all the time.” Once, fucking himself on Cassidy’s dick with his hands in the other’s hands and his thighs slick with sweat - Mako giving it his all, always a power bottom; Cassidy breathless, submissive nearly to the point of braindeath - Cassidy opened his eyes for once to gaze at him so strangely and Mako could only describe the look as Oedipal, as deeply screwed up. 

“What happened to her?” he asked Cassidy afterward.

Cassidy put his fingers against Mako’s mouth and didn’t tell him this part of the story until several more months into their relationship.

Jonathan, on the other hand, was a human see-saw that kept his family in a state of constant anticipation - anxious terror when things were good in expectation of the day when they’d turn bad, desperately hopeful when they were bad while waiting for them to become good again. In chilly, briny July, he’d chop the heads off of fish and brew stew with a pound of fresh shrimp, cherry tomatoes, clam juice, and rosemary; play Clapton on the hi-fi and dance his quivering wife around the living room while Cat gave Cassidy wet willies on the couch and Baby Charley drew his head around in sweeping circles along to the music; kiss his children goodbye on their ways off to school, sometimes even tenderly run his fingers over their beautiful blond heads; sleep eight hours a night; live. In the temperate warmth of December, it was masala dosa, aptly named gunpowder paste, tablespoons of ghee, serrano chiles; it was throwing the kids into scalding bathwater, slugging them around by those same beautiful blond heads until their hair came out in yellow clumps; it was wakefulness deep into the night spent draining bottles of cognac and wine and scotch and yes, more wine; it was 11:22 in the evening, when Cassidy came stumbling home an hour after curfew, Jonathan waiting in the driveway with his jumper cables.

“Where the hell have you been?”

Cassidy, then fifteen, had started to get mouthy. “Exactly where I said I was.”

Jonathan was silently enraged by this and only gave it away in his eyes, which became like twin whirlpools of Tiffany blue. “You’re an hour late.”

“I promise I’ll be up bright and early for school tomorrow, Pops. Don’t get your knickers in a twist.”

Immediately, there came the metal clamps of the jumper cables jumping out and hurtling towards Cassidy’s face, catching him squarely in the temple. Before Cassidy could orient himself enough to rush his father, Jonathan caught him again in the left eye and was there, grabbing him by the waistband, cracking the cables against his head again and again and again and again. 

“ _ Fuck you! _ ” Cassidy roared, struggling to get his hands around the cables and always, always coming up empty. “ _ Fuck you! Fuck you! _ ”

“I’ll teach you how to talk to me like that, you shit!” At this point, Jonathan had abandoned the cables and simply went with the Saturnine power of his fists, which is how Cassidy ended up in biology the next day with a double case of black-eye blues and a huge red thing like a blush on his right cheek.

“Fell down the stairs,” he explained to every person who asked. The Villiers house didn’t even have stairs.

Through it all, Cassidy grew. He ate like a horse and shot up like a wild weed, filling out into a profoundly animalistic musculature, a frog or a panther of some breed. He skipped class to overdose on Adderall and eat pussy in the girls’ lavatory, relished hands in his hair, relished augmented attention and reaction time. He mowed the grass for April Cranston, a forty-two year old golf widow who churned out romance paperbacks on a biannual schedule and always thanked him for his work with peanut butter cookies and flowers tucked delicately into his blond tresses. He sat in Cat’s bedroom and stole with her red sips from the bottle of Yellow Tail Cab Sav they would later replace with cranberry juice, talking about girls, playing with each other’s hair.

“You know Jenni Hartell?”

“The horse girl? The girl who rides and draws and talks nonstop about horses?”

“Yes.” Cat began to wrap a thick rubber band around Cassidy’s long hair, stationing the ponytail up girlishly high on the back of his head. “She’s so cute.”

“Yeah, if you like bloody fuckin’ dags.”

“I’m not talking about her personality, Cass. I’m talking about  _ knockers _ .” Cat shivered emphatically. “I want her to sit on my face so bad.”

“You know who I got to sit on my face last week?”

“Who?”

“Guess.”

“Oh, fuck you, Cass, I’m too old for this bullshit.”

“You’re eighteen.”

“Exactly. I’m an adult. No more guessing games. I want every lurid detail.”

Cassidy reached over with one muscular arm to snatch the bottle of red from Cat’s nightstand. Cat’s thick legs and thicker thighs bracketed his body where he sat; resting the bottle against her right knee after his long drag, Cassidy coughed and said, “Sheridan Pierce.  _ Man _ , she tasted so sweet. She was the wettest girl I ever ate, and after I was done, she sucked my dick and let me come on her face.”

“Dude, isn’t she Catholic?”

“It’s the Catholics that are the nastiest. It’s the guilt; it makes it sexier for them.”

At this, Cat threw her head back and released a bona fide laugh. Beating her fists into the wall of Cassidy’s back, she nabbed the Yellow Tail from her brother and said, “I always knew I kept you around for a reason. You’re just, so, so good. I love you so much.”

That weekend, he walked to the Cranston house and took the mower out of the garage that had been left open for him. Meticulously, he mowed the front lawn into a verdant carpet that did not even dream of shagginess. Knocking on the front door afterward, looking for his pay in the form of eight five-dollar notes, snickerdoodles, and an orchid or two, he listened for the customary, “It’s open!” before stepping with almost familial ease into the house, into the kitchen, where Mrs. Cranston would be waiting - only she wasn’t there, and there were no cookies, and the phalaenopsis still had as many blooms as it had had on it the last time he’d seen it.

“In here, Cassidy,” came the quiet voice.

He - this sexy, moderately experienced boy - followed said voice into the living room, then found himself made to blush at what he discovered there.

Mrs. Cranston was standing in the middle of the room in an open bathrobe and a negligee that probably would have looked less alarming on a woman half her age, her mocha hair a mess, her face unmade up. She smiled the way she always did at Cassidy and beckoned him closer with curling fingers. 

“Here,” she said, then pulled the expected money out of the gaping pocket of her robe. “This is for you.”

Cassidy approached her like a spooked animal. Took the money and tucked it into his own, considerably less gaping pocket. Tried to look at Mrs. Cranston’s face and found that he could not tear his eyes away from the prominence of her breasts, the shadow of a nipple partially concealed by sheer ivory fabric. “Thank you,” he mumbled.

“You should look at my face when you thank me, Cassidy,” Mrs. Cranston said without heat. “It’s rude to stare.”

Cassidy’s eyes were planets when they rose to Mrs. Cranston’s face and saw her still smiling, still so very calm. “I’m sorry,” he said, not hearing himself at all until maybe about thirty seconds after the words left him.

“You’re forgiven.” Mrs. Cranston reached out and caught a piece of Cassidy’s long hair between her fingers. Tucking this hair behind his ear and letting her fingers trail almost too easily along his jaw and then down his neck, into his collarbone, she giggled a little and asked, “Is there anything else?”

To this day, Cassidy doesn’t know exactly what happened next. It was his first real and true blackout, the first time his mind just shut down, unable to comprehend the reality of reality. He came to to a bedroom decorated with pictures of long-gone children, to sheer ivory drapes that matched the negligee in a way that seemed deliberate instead of accidental, to Mrs. Cranston uttering firm commands beneath him - “Harder,” and “Yes, like that,” and “I will not break, Cassidy,” and “Right there, right there.” - and his teenage penis sliding in and out of her, his first time, oh me oh my.

“Fuck me like a man,” April Cranston told him. He closed his eyes and did so, and came and made no noise.

Two years later, he left for Melbourne and Victoria University. Between the eighteenth and twenty-first years of his life, it was nothing but living in the third-floor art classroom sculpting with metal, then clay, then wood, then - finally, after so long looking for the medium that most suited him - glass; nothing but selling prescriptions and snorting coke off of jewel cases before, after, and sometimes during class; nothing but fucking bossy girls and high-spirited twinks in public restrooms and purposefully neglecting to get their numbers or, if their numbers were insistently given to him, call back; nothing but punching out douchebags in university bars - a habit which eventually got him kicked out of college, homeless without access to dormitories, and jobless without the grace of work study. After selling his last script and living in his car for a week, Cassidy found himself renting a shithole flat above the boxing gym Momentum, eating instant oatmeal twice a day, doing janitorial work for the nearby law firm, and no, never once entertaining thoughts of trotting back to Ocean Grove with his tail between his legs. In his one-bath studio, he reigned supreme and was never called stupid, ugly, lazy, or wrong. He minded his own business and paid his rent cleaning Momentous toilets. 

One night, as he stored cheapo mop and plastic bucket in the storage closet, the Momentous owner - an ursine, Amazonian woman with shockingly red hair that she wore plaited twice along the back of her head - looked at him from across the floor and said, “Your name is Charlie, right?”

Cassidy felt these words as if they were physical objects thrown at him. He was reminded of his baby brother the biology major, his floppy hair and his way of sleeping, like their mother, for so many long and tragic hours. Without looking up, he corrected the owner. “Cassidy.”

“Cassidy.” The owner watched him with her arms crossed over an ample chest, watched him until he got around to looking straight at her. “You’re big,” she said. “Very big. What are they feeding you?”

“Right now? Quick oats.”

“Oh, we can do better than that.” The owner smiled put on a smile that looked as though it had not seen much use; it was not artificial, but stiff, masculine. “When’s the last time you ate an egg? Or white meat?”

Cassidy searched for his answer on the ceiling. “Two months ago.”

“Ouch.” 

Cassidy gave a noncommittal shrug. “Can’t afford it.”

The owner examined him openly, unashamed of the intensity of her gaze. Without saying anything, she turned away and headed into her office. Assuming the conversation was over, Cassidy finished storing his cleaning supplies and started for the door; when he was halfway there, however, the owner emerged into the gym proper once more with a fifty-dollar banknote in her outstretched hand.

“Buy eggs, chicken breasts, peanut butter, and a carton of milk. Throw in a bunch of bananas if you can make it stretch.” She did not register the naked shock on Cassidy’s face, or, if she did, she refused to show it. “Come here tomorrow at seven AM. Wear something you can sweat in.”

Which is how Cassidy ended up in Momentum on a daily basis, building muscle mass, sparring on the floor, and becoming. 

The owner - one Savannah Mora - made him her personal project. Every day a snide comment here and an incisive criticism there, but these were bricks and mortar, her hands gripping Cassidy’s hips to adjust his stance, her voice in his ear like April Cranston’s - “Faster. Harder. Like that.  _ Good _ .” At first, Cassidy went along with it all just to make some money; he, having spent his whole life studying under the king of beatdowns, had no trouble learning the language of jab and cross and hook and uppercut, no trouble beating fellow small-timers like Daryl Dunne and Harley Negga into the ground like they’d personally wronged him. Then came the decisive match with Cory Maltzman, though - Maltzman big shit in the light heavyweight division; Cassidy a virtual unknown with his hair in thick blond cornrows - and after two mouths full of blood, a broken nasal bridge, and a TKO in the third round, Cassidy found himself victorious and abruptly rocketed to superstardom in the Melbourne boxing scene, his heart hideous and overdriven as he sat on the piece of shit cot in the locker room, getting his face prodded by the physio.

“You’re not saying anything.”

“What?” Cassidy, for the first time, noticed the fluorescent light overhead and the delicate, manicured hands pressing his nasal bones back into place. He couldn’t feel anything, anything at all but hymenopteran buzzing all over his body and inside his skin. 

“Usually these athletes all bitch and bitch and bitch. ‘ _ That hurts! Ow! _ ’ That or they’re trying to get my number.” The physio produced a snorting laugh. “Same shit all the time. Who would have guessed that the cutest one of them all would turn out to be a mute.”

“You’re calling me cute?”

“ _ Yes _ , cutie.” Again, the physio laughed, but this time, it sounded less like a snort and more like a proper chuckle. “Cannot stress how ugly boxers are. Maybe one day you’ll be ugly like them, too, after you’ve had all the bones in your face broken and your eyes swell shut and you’re eating through a tube in your stomach and shitting into a colostomy bag.”

“What are you talking about?” 

“Divination.” The physio reached for the nasal cast and, with unshaking hands, fitted it to the bridge of Cassidy’s nose. Taping the contraption down, she grinned, and Cassidy came all at once to the realization that she was too gorgeous to be a physiotherapist. “Listen,” she said. Dipped a hand into the pocket of her scrubs, came out with a rectangle of cardstock on which her name and several phone numbers were printed. She tucked this card into the waistband of Cassidy’s shorts. “Call my emergency number tomorrow at three. Say your nose is bothering you and that you need another cast. Wait for me at your flat. Put on something nice, but not too nice.”

It cannot be stressed enough how good this was - how good this always, always was, April Cranston and Savannah Mora and the beautiful physio and, years later, Mako Gehringer - to be told what to do.

For several moments, all Cassidy could do was blink dumbly, unsure that he was hearing what he was hearing. When speech came, it came as an embarrassing croak. “What if I forget?”

“Then you blew it.” The physio gave him a lovely, perfectly unbothered smile. “Life will go on. It’s up to you.”

The next day, at 3:02 PM, Cassidy dialed Rosalee Hollings at her emergency number and awaited her voice with breath that was bated.

His life transformed as kaleidoscope images do - all the same elements present, just rotated and inverted into novel shapes and configurations. The big thing was the money, which became more and more abundant the harder he punched, the bloodier he grinned, the cockier he talked for network cable cameras, spitting shit like, “There ain’t never been no one like me, and there ain’t never gonna be no one like me.” There was the new flat in Toorak, the silk sheets and Aboriginal wall art and skinny dipping in the pool that was damn near as big as the Pacific. There was Rosalee, who stretched out flawless and naked in his bed and told him what to do always - “Fix your shirt collar, love,” and “Give ‘em hell, rockstar,” and “Fuck me so hard, Cass,” and “Marry me,” six months into their relationship and waiting for her pilates belly to do the first trimester pop. There was the physical metamorphosis - him no longer simply tall and broad but thick, even massive, needlestuck with so much amphetamine and cocaine that the word “high” didn’t even cover it anymore. He was getting married in Sydney. He was eating raw eggs in the morning kitchen; chancing death or, at the very least, traumatic brain damage every time he stepped into the ring. He was beautiful, he could dance, he was ten feet tall and bulletproof and invincible. He was dipping his toes in heroin and Xanax and really, really hoping, sometimes, that he’d die for his hubris. 

On a chilly afternoon in July 2014, the Villiers siblings convened at EZARD on Flinders Lane. Cassidy, newly twenty-five years old on this crisp day, wore a purple dress shirt and the genuine leather boots Rosalee had bought for him their first Christmas together, when she’d been a blimp floating happily around the house, rubbing her belly, cherrypicking names. The reservation had been made in his name. He was the first to arrive.

While waiting for his siblings, Cassidy flicked through his smartphone and picked at the gauze taped to the inside of his right elbow. He’d shot up fifteen minutes prior and was feeling both very alert and very paranoid, the sensation of eyes crawling like insects over his brawny form, the conversation he’d had with Dilly Dannels several hours ago still very loud in his ears.

“I’m going to tell her.”

“No.”

“I’m going to do it.” Dilly was the executive chef in the kitchen at the QT Melbourne; a smart, funny, bossy woman with a purebred Pomeranian and the most darling streak of lechery; and Cassidy’s girlfriend for the prior two years. She was putting her dress on. She was stepping into her shoes. She was grabbing Cassidy by the back of his head the way his father used to and telling him, “I’m calling her tonight. Either you tell her or I will.”

“Dil, shut the fuck up and go home.” They were at the Toorak flat in the middle of the day, Rosalee at work and the kid at daycare. Fucking another woman in the same bed he and his wife slept in was a thrill in the vein of boxing and using. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“It’ll be too late, Cassidy.” She still had him by his hair; she used this leverage to turn his head around to face her. “I’m not doing this anymore if you’re not going to grow up and make a choice. It’s me or her.”

This, of course, was not an easy choice. There was Rosalee, who he still loved despite everything. There were Mackenzie and Opal and countless other bodies in countless other beds. There was Julian, his golden boy with planetary eyes. “I have a child, Dil,” he said.

“You  _ are _ a child,” came her venomous reply. And maybe she was right.

He could barely hold it all in his hands. Sometimes, he felt so inadequate - so like Atlas, the whole world on his shoulders - that he could fly into the atmosphere and simply disintegrate. 

Baby Charley - who had since ceased being Baby Charley and became just Charley around a year ago - arrived next, looking as tired as he always did, being in medical school and officially, clinically depressed. 

“Hey, mate.”

“Hey.” Charley slumped down in the chair at Cassidy’s left and didn’t look directly at him. He didn’t look directly at anyone but Cat anymore. “Cat’s running late. She called me on my cell.”

“That’s weird.” When Charley threw him a sideways glance: “I mean, that she called you and not me. Nobody calls me anymore.”

“Well, you don’t answer,” Charley noted in a way that sounded not angry, simply matter of fact. The words rolled out onto the table and tumbled across the pristine white cloth with a sort of hollow finality that signaled the first of several lulls in conversation. Thirty seconds in and they were already underperforming. It looked like it was going to be a good night.

“How’s school?”

“Great. You know, soul-breaking and harder than anything I’ve ever done, but great. I just started my pharmacology stuff.”

“Is it interesting?”

“It’s just a lot of memorization, really.” Charley rubbed the bridge of his nose; his voice became slightly strained. “Everything is memorization. Would you like to hear my favorite suffix?”

“Uh, sure.”

“-Triptan.” Charley shook his head a little, as if he somehow disbelieved the words coming out of him. “It just sounds cool.”

A waiter came around and filled a glass with cool water for Charley. Cassidy ached for his sister, for her mediating influence and facility with group conversations. He remembered a time when he and Charley were close - primarily because he was the thing perpetually positioned between his brother and his father - and wondered, in the part of his mind that spun out crazily with anxiety, doing donuts, screeching a little, what had happened in the years between Ocean Grove and now that made their relationship so uneasy. Cassidy watched Charley take a generous sip of water, stare at the smallish lamp casting ambient light over their table, then turn to look at his collarbone and ask, “How’s boxing?”

“Brilliant as always.” This, Cassidy could openly grin about, him most in his element when he was braggadocious and arrogant. “Last week, I damn near killed Luca Santacrose in the ring.”

Charley’s mouth turned down at the corner. “And you’re proud of that,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

Cassidy didn’t know what to say, but it turned out he didn’t have to say anything; at that moment, Cat was all at once at the table, looking a little frazzled around the edges and embarrassingly underdressed for the restaurant in a pair of mom jeans and a ripped Men At Work T-shirt. In the time since Cassidy had last seen her, she had cut her hair to shoulder-length and stopped using mouthwash to mask the scent of gin on her breath.

“Brothers, hello!” There went her hand in the air, waving sideways once before dropping to the tabletop as she sat at Cassidy’s right. The line of Charley’s shoulders morphed into something distinctly more comfortable with the arrival of the oldest Villiers baby. Cat could have leaned all the way back in her chair and kicked her feet up, ankles crossed, on the table, but instead, she just smiled at her brothers and uttered, “It’s so nice when we get together.” They hadn’t done this since Cassidy’s wedding, three whole years ago. “How’s school, Charley?” 

This was the first of dinner’s many depressing moments. Whereas Cassidy had gotten the SparkNotes version of Medical School: The Charley Villiers Experience, Cat got much more crucial and tantalizing details such as the sort of horrific (as in, completely socially retarded and mean) diagnostician that was Charley’s physiology professor, the diet of instant oatmeal and just as instant macaroni and cheese Charley was living on (which, frankly, made Cassidy want to die with guilt, him being so rich, treating Rosalee and Dilly and yes, even Opal - a bona fide prostitute - to hundred-dollar dinners and fifteen carat diamonds), the whole boring ass list of pharmacological prefixes and suffixes, the budding immunologist he was dating when he wasn’t breaking his back trying to make As. For fifteen minutes, while Cassidy sort of fretfully pored over EZARD’s a la carte menu and snowballed the feeling of psychotic paranoia in his gut, he felt as though he was an intruder into his brother and sister’s lives that had traveled so far away from his own.

Eventually, Cat looked at him. Her eyes were glazed over; she looked extremely, excruciatingly like her mother. “What about you, duder?” she asked. While she and Charley had been talking, she’d ordered a cocktail of Tanqueray No. Ten and Miller's Westborne; glancing anxiously around for this, she continued her line of questioning: “How’s Rosalee? How’s my bug?”

The previous night, Cassidy and Rosalee had gotten into maybe their eighteenth screaming match in the past month, this time about the results of Rosalee’s latest STD test, which had come back positive for chlamydia. Rosalee had thrown a Louboutin at Cassidy’s head, shrieking about “HIV” and “who are you seeing?” Cassidy had gotten her up against the wall, commanding her just as he commanded Dilly to “shut the fuck up.” She’d pummeled the bulwark of his chest, affecting nothing. He’d punched the wall next to her head, cracking plaster. In the end, Rosalee had slept in their king-size alone, dissolving around azithromycin, while Cassidy had laid awake in Julian’s bed with the little one on his chest.

“Daddy?” Julian had asked.

“Yes, my love?”

“Why you sleep here?”

Cassidy had carded his hands through the soft yellow hair growing out of Julian’s crown. “I just miss you tonight,” he’d said.

Julian had whispered nothing more, just nuzzled further into his father’s hard, hard body. Cassidy had slept not at all; coming to in the present, he looked Cat in the face and lied. 

“They’re great. Everything is great.”

Cat’s boozy eyes narrowed. “I’ll be nice and let you fib.”

This nearly enraged Cassidy. “Oh, Cat, what do you even know?”

“I know things. I have my ways.”

“Is everyone ready to order?” some featureless voice asked.

A Greek chorus, the Villiers siblings all looked up and said, “No.”

“What are you talking about, you have your ways?” Cassidy asked. “What is that bullshit code for?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Reaching for her cocktail, which the rejected waiter had brought around seconds earlier, Cat allowed her voice to descend into a genuinely somber, serious register. “Maybe it’s code for  _ your wife called me to ask me who you were seeing on the side, gee that’s really fuckin’ embarrassing _ . Maybe it’s code for  _ Jules called me, too, how his aunt loves to hear from him except when he’s saying things like ‘can I live with you?’ and ‘Mummy and Daddy scream _ .’”

Cue the second major lull. Charley’s eyes remained firmly glued to his menu while Cassidy and Cat stared each other down as Australian cowboys across the dusty expanse of a table’s worth of space. Eventually, the waiter came around again, looking fairly chastised, and took down their orders for the first course: Spencer Gulf kingfish with avocado and cultured goat’s milk, steamed king prawn dumplings, golden broth, Brook trout roe, Victorian mushrooms, aged Parmesan custard, potato crisps, chrysanthemum oil. In the waiter’s wake, Cassidy glared at his sister and leaned back in his chair so that his chest puffed out - him not entirely above using his brawn to intimidate the one person who had never been scared of him, not even a little.

“Who are you to look down on me?” he asked.

“I’m not looking down on you, Cass.” Cat’s mouth pulled sideways into an ambiguous smile. “I’m just saying, you could be honest instead of just straight up lying because we’re in a fancy restaurant and you’re a rich person and it sounds good.”

“That’s rich,  _ you _ talking about honesty.”

“Can we not do this today,” Charley uttered beneath his breath - again, the phrase not a question but a simple statement. Of course he would say this the moment Cat came under fire, Cassidy thought to himself. Of course it was the two of them against him.

Ignoring Charley, Cassidy fixed Cat with a cutting look and asked, “When’s the last time you went to bed sober, huh? When’s the last time you woke up and didn’t immediately hit the bottle?”

“You!” Cat exploded, drawing the eyes of several patrons at neighboring tables, then devolved into delirious laughter, burying her face momentarily in her hands. “ _ You’re _ lecturing  _ me _ about sobriety! A man so coked up and high you’re on the bloody ceiling!  _ You! _ ”

“Piss off, Cat. Go back to your dyke wife and your piece of shit life back in Ocean Grove, you fuckin’ cunt.”

“I’m leaving,” Charley quietly announced.

“Yeah, run away like you always do. That’s mature.”

“Charley, sit down,” Cat ordered. As the oldest, she had the authority to command the other two without shame; Charley, who had begun to stand up, dropped back into his chair without a word. “How about we all agree not to talk unless we have something productive to say, okay? How does that sound?”

Charley, of course, was fully on board. Majority rule and all that jazz, Cassidy found himself beaten into submission, and of course, there was a part of him that ached for this, that liked it so much. 

Through the first course, the Villiers siblings were basically silent. Cat and Charley occasionally made small talk about the former’s life in Ocean Grove - her never having left for the city like her younger brothers, her having resigned herself to a small town existence for the remainder of her years - but on the whole, each flaxen-haired beauty simply folded themselves into their starters, avoiding one another’s eyes and attaching themselves idly to whatever uninteresting bullshit went on around them: the old woman with what looked like a dead bird in her hair at the table to Cat’s left, the lovers sort of canoodling several yards away. The waiter came around to ask for their decisions on the second course, and - unused to eating so much and so lavishly - Cat and Charley stuttered through their orders of Murray cod, rice noodles, lardo, and Chinese broccoli; of Chinese style duck, black rice, Japanese turnip, and spring onion. Then, as the waiter walked away, Cat stared into his back and said, “I need you guys to come home soon.”

“I can’t,” came Charley’s immediate reply. When Cat gave him a dull, unimpressed look: “Medical school.”

Cassidy floundered for an excuse of his own but found he didn’t have any. His next fight hadn’t even been scheduled yet. “Um,” he said.

“I don’t care what’s going on or how hard it is to make time,” Cat plowed on. “Make time anyway. Mum really needs to see you guys.”

The mention of the Villers matriarch made Cassidy’s stomach flip around his kingfish. He hadn’t seen his mother, as he hadn’t seen both of his siblings, since his wedding, and then, her eyes had long since died and the car keys had been taken away from her after the literally back-breaking crash of 2009. All at once, with Cat and Charley looking at each other and him over the table he’d reserved and the food he was buying for them - more out of a sense of guilt and obligation than authentic familial love - Cassidy realized the depth of his abandonment of his family, of Charley, of Catherine, of his mother who had needed him so much. He’d spent years protecting everyone to the best of his ability until one day it became too much, and now, he was so far away from them all that maybe, just maybe, he didn’t even know them anymore.

What a big, strong man he was.

What a man; what a man indeed.

The next day, he drove his Maserati the hour and forty-five minutes it took to get to Ocean Grove. He left without telling Rosalee, without doing anything but kissing Julian on the top of his head before the boy left for daycare that morning. Sliding down the M1, pooling dread and nausea in his gut, Cassidy rehearsed explanations to give to his parents for his unannounced, uncharacteristic return - “It’s been busy for the past three-thousand years, but I missed you guys and wanted to pop in,” which was only a partial truth; “An angel visited me and told me I had three months to live and I wanted to see you one last time,” which was an utter lie; “Cat strong-armed me into coming back home and the thought made me sick but here I am,” which was the real truth; “I’m sorry,” which he wouldn’t say, not even if it meant his own death. 

His first stop in Ocean Grove was Flowers by Catherine - the nursery/gift shop run by his older sister and the racial mutt everyone referred to as her wife. Parking his car - which was more expensive than anything anywhere in a three mile radius, probably - on the curb in front of the mint green structure, Cassidy made himself ignore the waxing guilt within him and stepped into the shop seeking his sister. He was immediately hit by the scent of jasmine, so thick it was almost a wall with which he collided.

Cat was nowhere in sight. Teala sat at the register, bronze and poring over a clipboard. Cassidy cleared his throat and watched the woman look up.

“Hello.”

“Cassidy,” Teala said in a voice that suggested she’d expected him - which, to be sure, was odd, as Cassidy had not expressed his plans to stop by to Cat. She turned back to her clipboard but kept talking. “Cat’s in the greenhouse. She’ll be back in a minute.”

“Okay.” Then, all at once, there was nothing to talk about, and the guilt came back at full force. 

As Cassidy sort of dawdled around the shop, examining the royal bluebell, the waratah, the Sturt's desert rose, the Cooktown Orchid, he allowed himself to imagine a fuller, more together life in which he visited home often and had actual relationships with his family members and their associates; in which he and Teala could make small talk about Ocean Grove living and the ins and outs of annuals instead of awkwardly trading glances without saying anything, knowing what they knew and speaking of it not at all. Cassidy knew that Teala knew he was a drug addict who slept around on his wife. Teala knew that Cassidy knew that Cat was a drunk akin to her mother. This existed between them in a manner that defied speech - that is, until Teala cut her eyes at Cassidy and said, “You know, Cat’s been doing all the work around here.”

“What?”

“She’s been taking care of your folks all by herself for the past seven years.” Suddenly, Teala was overtaken by a look of such anger, such piercing disappointment, that Cassidy’s mouth could not help but fall open in shock. “The least you could do is thank her.”

Before Cassidy could say anything - or, at the very least, wipe the utterly stupid look of astonishment off of his face - Cat entered the shop through the transparent curtain leading to the greenhouse, speckled with dirt and almost suspiciously cheery. 

“Cass!” she greeted, wiping her hands off on her apron and coming around, to Cassidy’s dull bewilderment, to give him a manly, back-slapping, one-armed hug the likes of which they hadn’t shared since Cassidy first left for Melbourne. “I thought I was just gonna meet you later at the house; I didn’t expect to see you here this morning.”

“I know, I’m just full of surprises.”

“What’s going on, duder? Just came to stop and smell the roses or is there an actual mission going on here?”

“You know me so well,” Cassidy uttered with a sigh. When Cat gave him a strange, probing look: “I wanted to get some flowers for Mum.”

Cat’s face smoothed over with what was either pride or simple awe; it was hard to tell which it was. “Ahh,” she breathed, stepping away from Cassidy and directly into her florist’s persona, her left arm coming up to cross over her chest as her right hand reached for the pencil tucked behind her ear. “What do you want to say to her? Pink tulips are good for showing basic care.”

“What bouquet says, ‘ _ I’ve been a dick for the past thousand years but I love you, hello _ ’?”

Cat pursed her lips and whirled her eyes around the nursery, alighting them on blooms here and there. Eventually, she wandered in the direction of the  _ Ruta graveolens _ \- “Common rue is your standard apology plant.” - then backtracked toward the  _ Rosa × alba _ \- “White roses symbolize humility.”

“And love?” Cassidy asked.

Cat’s hand shot out to the right and caressed a pale yellow flower. “Primrose,” she said. “Eternal love.”

Cassidy gestured expansively with both hands. “Ring me up, sis.” He drove to the house with his bouquet riding shotgun and his heart in some lower register. 

As he had in all the horrible prior years, Jonathan waited in the driveway for his son, sitting in a fold-out chair with his hands around a forty-ounce. Cassidy stepping out of the Maserati in pink Ray-Ban sunglasses, the sky above some vibrantly blue-purple hue that smelled like impending rain, Jonathan looked overweight, grizzly, profoundly middle-aged. It made Cassidy’s skin crawl.

“Nice ride,” Jonathan remarked, bringing the lip of the forty up to his mouth and taking a kind of long drag. Abruptly, as Cassidy came closer with the flowers hanging in his hand at his side, blooms facing the ground, Jonathan’s eyes narrowed. “What’s with the faggy sunglasses?”

Cassidy - an adult in mere years spent on the Earth if not in emotional maturity - did not allow himself to be bothered by this or even to dignify it with a response. He leaned into the sort of tired civility he had cultivated with his father since escaping the iron vice of the Villiers household, said, “Good morning.” Then, without letting Jonathan respond: “Mum’s inside?”

“In the kitchen, making a drink.” Cassidy could hear the blender going and this, somehow, depressed him so much he wanted to cry for maybe the first time in years. Jonathan examined him with scrupulous, greedy eyes that wanted to eat him whole. “It’s been awhile, son. How’s it shaking?”

Cassidy was brought back to the moment yesterday when all he did was lie about his life. He felt as though he owed his father much less than he did Cat; despite this, he heard himself say, “Life is a little hard right now. I’m kind of at a breaking point.”

“Well, I could have told you that was going to happen,” Jonathan said with his typical no-bullshit certainty about everything. “That’s par for the course once you shack up and pop out an ankle-biter or two.” Saying this, he gave Cassidy a look that was somehow more scrutinizing than the one he was already giving him. “There hasn’t been another one, has there?”

“Another kid? No.”

“Well.” Jonathan nursed his beer. “I wouldn’t have put it past you to keep something like that from your old man.”

It was this kind of bitterness that Cassidy could not stand and could not stand to think he didn’t deserve. Ignoring the rush of cocaine anger - no, just plain, entirely justified anger - in his center, he announced, “I’m going inside,” and proceeded to make good on his words.

Shelly stood in the kitchen. Watching her pour herself a screwdriver, Cassidy observed that her tremor had grown significantly worse since the last time he’d seen her - her arms jerking abortively, pathetically; her cocktail spilling this way and that as she aimed for her glass and missed. Cassidy watched, for long, guilty moments that made his brain feel like it was actually exploding in his skull, as his mother rifled through the kitchen for a dishtowel, eventually found one, then spent upwards of a minute trying to sop up her mess. When he simply couldn’t take it anymore, he came up behind Shelly and took the dishtowel from her, murmuring, “Let me get that, Mum.”

“Cassidy!” Shelly cried. Her voice brimmed with joy, but her eyes remained fishy, dead. She touched one shivering hand to her son’s face, said, “Look at you. You’re here.”

“I’m here.” Tossing the yellowy dishtowel in the sink, Cassidy raised his yellowy bouquet in the space between their bodies - his massive and virile, hers quaking and frail. “These are for you. Cat helped me pick them out.”

“Oh, such beautiful flowers.” She took them, and immediately they began to shake as if stirred by some faint yet violent wind. Suddenly, she was overtaken by a look of vague confusion; glancing around the room, she muttered, “I know there’s a vase somewhere in here…”

So Cassidy helped her locate an appropriate vessel and set the flowers up in the living room. Mother and son sat together on the sofa and, in the somewhat dim July morning, talked until other Villiers arrived. 

Cassidy found his mother changed. There had always been hints of this ultimate, final stage of alcoholism, always a progressive worsening over the years as the gradient of sickness grew more and more opaque, but he’d never seen her illness more pronounced than he did on the day after his twenty-fifth birthday, when they had the long, meandering, difficult conversation about Melbourne life and Julian and his wife and his father. Shelly must have commented on the flowers twenty times in the same hour, each time with the same faraway smile on her face and each time in the same exact way, as if they were novel: “Oh, such beautiful flowers.” Ditto the question about her grandchild: “How is Julian? I haven’t seen him since he was a baby.” Ditto the commentary on Cassidy’s appearance, the hand on the inside of his elbow, the crease at the center of her forehead: “You’re so big! But you look so tired, my love. Have you been sleeping well?” Ditto the excuse she reserved for her husband: “Now you know your father has had a hard life. Getting fired…” - and  _ oh my God! _ , Cassidy thought,  _ always the tragedy of getting fired! _ \- “... took so much out of him.”

Eventually, he looked at her and said, “Mum?”

Dragging her finger along the inside of her drained glass and bringing that finger up to lick, Shelly glanced over at her son with eyes that subtly, but perceptibly, twitched back and forth. “Yes, my love?”

Again, Cassidy felt that all too embarrassing urge to cry. When he told Mako this story five months into their relationship with his head in the other man’s lap, his eyes closed, him somewhere unknown and fuzzy on the spectrum between masculine emotional fortitude (or, really, emotional nonexistence) and feminine lability, Mako put a hand on his crown and said, “I cry all the time.”

“I know,” Cassidy replied. “You’re so much stronger than I am.” 

Back to Ocean Grove, July 6th, 2014. Back to Cassidy staring into his mother’s clear blue earthquake eyes, trying to find some part of her that didn’t tremble like a leaf in autumn wind. 

Questions flooded him.  _ Why _ s and  _ how _ s and  _ are you _ s and  _ is there _ s. Instead of giving them a voice, Cassidy defaulted to dumb and blandly loving. “I missed you.”

Shelly gave him a paper-thin smile in reply. “I missed you, too.”

Then Cat and their father were in the room, arguing about the length of the former’s hair and busily passing perhaps a novel forty-ounce between them, sort of territorial about it, the quietly simmering anger of drunks. Then the morning passed into lunchtime and four addicts stumbled around the kitchen trying to put a proper meal together, demanding deli meat and garlic aioli and French bread and, of course, tomato juice and vodka. Then they sat around with Al Green on the gramophone, munching, hating each other (with the constant exception of Shelly, who loved them all deeply). Then Jonathan put his highball down on the end table - a dull  _ thunk _ , sonic shockwave that flew across the room and hit each family member with the same vicious, full-bodied physicality with which he himself had so often hit them - and said, “I wasn’t expecting to see you today, Cass.”

Without warning, Cassidy’s sympathetic nervous system was soaring into overdrive, his pupils and bronchioles dilating, his abdominal organs constricting. His practiced response to his father’s bullshit was cheek. “I wasn’t expecting that either. Who would have guessed the prodigal son would have wanted to return to  _ whiskey drunk in the middle of the afternoon _ and his good friend  _ knuckles of steel _ ?”

“Oh, come off it, you son of a bitch,” Jonathan clapped back, shark-eyed and always, always impossibly large even in his pathetic, pot-bellied midlife. “You don’t think I can recognize an addict when I see one? I  _ wrote _ that book, boy, and you’re just reading from it because it’s all you’ve ever known.”

“Is that supposed to redeem you?” Cassidy allowed his voice to slip to the left, into sarcastic, oh so gooey sweetness. “Aww, he’s taking responsibility for how much he fucked me up, maybe I’ll just come back home and stay forever and eve-”

“How high are you, huh?” Jonathan was on his feet and immediately so was Cat, standing between father and son with her hands up in both directions. “You think your sister doesn’t tell me what goes on in that big fancy house in Toorak? You think you’re better than me because you’re shooting up instead of drinking yourself to death?”

“Oh my  _ God! _ ” Cassidy tugged murderously at his hair with his head hung down near his knees, him yelling into the floor. “I don’t think I’m better than you, don’t you get it?! You  _ ruined _ me!”

Though Cassidy did not see it, Jonathan had the nerve to look shocked. “ _ I _ ruined  _ you? _ ”

“Please stop,” Cat pleaded, cutting her eyes at Shelly, who was staring out the window with a fairly heartbroken look about her, wet-faced, sniffling. “ _ Please _ , this was supposed to be a good day.”

“Shut up!” Cassidy cried out in his cocaine rage. He abandoned his unfinished lunch, his bloody cocktail on the coffee table and staggered for the door. “I’m done with all of you!”

“Oh, no you don’t-” There Jonathan was, barging past Cat to grab Cassidy by the yoke of his shirt amidst his daughter’s frantic yelling and his wife’s barely audible sobs. There Cassidy was, cracking his fist against his father’s face hard enough to shatter bone.

For a moment that would haunt Cassidy for years, he heard nothing, perceived nothing but the violent trickle of blood out of his father’s nose and the accompanying, all too familiar rage in the man’s eyes - these eyes that had stared at him since he was a nothing, these eyes that he’d never see again save for in his waking dreams after this day. Cat’s arms came around Jonathan’s neck from behind, her pulling their father back into her chest the very same instant said father dove for Cassidy, his hands striving, seeking, finding Cassidy’s hair and yanking it viciously in a southerly direction. They were on the floor, three Villiers, tearing and bashing and screaming at each other, a feline tangle of golden limbs and golden hair. Shelly was rising up out of her chair without words and drifting into the kitchen to pour herself another Bloody Mary, to garnish it with a celery stalk and drink it down in damn near one gulp.

The tangle moved out of the door. Cassidy found himself running and tripping, rhythmically starting and stopping every time Jonathan or Cat grabbed at his hair or tore at his arm, a furious cycle of  _ fuck you _ s and  _ stop it _ s. Eventually he reached his car and was able to shove his father and sister away and slam the driver’s side door on them all in one fluid motion. As Jonathan elbowed Cat in the face and threw himself on the Maserati, as Cat fell back on her ass and caterwauled into the wintry Victorian air, Cassidy allowed himself one last savage, “ _ Fuck you! _ ” and reversed out of the driveway, speeding off down the street, back to Melbourne, back to cocaine and Rosalee and Julian.

He walked into the Toorak flat with his hair still a mess and angry red scores up and down his arms. He stormed into the kitchen, still enraged, and grabbed the pitcher of alkaline water out of the fridge to drink from directly. It was only passing back through the living room that he noticed his wife’s flaxen form standing by the pool, framed by the floor-to-ceiling windows, her back to him, her home in the middle of the afternoon like she nearly never was. He stepped outside to join her.

“What are you doing here?” were the first words out of his mouth, followed closely by, “It’s like, two o’clock.”

Rosalee looked at him and her face was tired, deeply old even in her twenty-fifth year of life. She said nothing, just handed him the stack of papers in her right hand. Cassidy only had to glance at the top of the first page to slip several floors lower into his wrath -  **_PETITION FOR DIVORCE_ ** , it said, in an infuriating serif font that made his vision go red at the corners.

“Your girlfriend called this morning,” Rosalee remarked with a sort of outrageous flatness to her tone. “Danielle, or Dilly, I think her name was. I’ve made a couple of phone calls myself - to the Australian Sports Commission, who I’ve graciously informed of your doping habit, and to my brand new lawyer, as you can see. I’ve packed your bags already, so you don’t have to worry about that.” She retrieved a pen seemingly from air and held it out to Cassidy, who stared at her suddenly hollow with anger, almost shaking in his rage. “Just sign where I’ve highlighted. Do me one solid, just once.”

“You can’t do this to me.”

“You’ve done everything in the world to me.”

“You can’t ruin my whole fuckin’ life like this!” The divorce papers crumpled in Cassidy’s hands and dropped into chlorine blue, and all at once he was on Rosalee, crowding her into the window with his hands on her collarbones, threatening to go higher and try for card-carrying strangulation. “You can’t fuckin’ do this to me!”

“I can!” Rosalee roared, suddenly full of guttural rage, her hands fisting in Cassidy’s shirt and attempting, to no avail, to shove the wall of his body away. “Die mad about it!”

Cassidy grabbed his wife by her mandibles and cracked her head back against the window, watched her struggle against his grip, drunk on the supremely negative energy between them. He might have done additional, more despicable acts, had Rosalee not drove the heel of her stiletto into the top of his foot, surprising and injuring him enough to release her so that she could fly into the house and to the phone to dial the police.

Cassidy would not see the police arrive, nor would he see any of this story’s major players ever again - not Rosalee, not his siblings, not his parents, not even Julian.

He would load his suitcase and duffel bag into his car and speed off into Melbourne proper, to the airport. 

He would stare up at the board of departures and pick the destination as far from Australia as he could imagine - the Crescent City, New Orleans.

He would check his luggage and itch to shoot up, stand in the public restroom and stare at his own face without recognizing it, the sea-blue eyes and the cracked and pink skin over his lips.

He would sit in the gate and talk to Cat on the phone, lying on the floor, a whole human mass that ultimately amounted to nothing.

“We’re in the emergency room at Geelong,” Cat said, sounding unusually frantic. “Mum passed out.”

“Mum always passes out,” Cassidy remarked, unimpressed.

“No, Cass, it’s different this time. She might die.”

Cassidy - who had run out of fucks to give and would only reflect on this day and on his whole broken ass family much later, in a Crescent City brand of therapy that would bring forth feminine tears long kept at bay - just sighed and said, “You have my sympathies.”

“Come to the hospital. I need you to be here.”

“Would you believe me if I told you I really don’t care anymore?”

“I would,” Cat replied, then sniffed loudly, wetly. “Come anyway. For me.”

Cassidy stared at the ceiling, the ditzy pattern of multicolored dots in an ocean of off-white. He was two hours from boarding his plane and a world away from the person he used to be - the boy who steeped in the ethanol pool of his family and blacked out fucking middle-aged neighbors and dived directly into the sea like he belonged in it, jellyfish-stung and beautiful. He didn’t say, “I can’t.” He said, “I’m not going to do that.”

“Cassidy, please come,” Cat begged, her voice soaring into a desperate octave that closely resembled that of her younger self. “Please help me, please don’t leave me alone.”

His capacity for cruelty unmatched by everyone but his father’s, Cassidy uttered a quiet, “Goodbye, Cat,” and promptly hung up. He turned his phone off and walked it over to the nearest rubbish bin, then dumped it in the receptacle without a second thought.

The twenty-hour flight allowed him to pool his thoughts of absolutely nothing in his hands and spill them onto the floor, his body going into withdrawal mode, his stomach full of shitty airplane fare - Sun Chips and canned modern Coca-Cola. Touching down in New Orleans, he was empty and over with the way he’d been empty and over with as a college dropout in Melbourne, and this is the way he stayed for three years until weekly visits to China, until a waiting room in Uptown, until Mako Gehringer.

Mako was thirty years old, furnished with a seven year old child and many of the neuroses that accompanied a double diagnosis of bipolar disorder and autism, and fairly exhausted from another workday at  _ Endymion _ , the most alternately stressful and low-key work environment that ever was. Cassidy was twenty-seven; functionally childless, single, and recovering for a long time up until that point; and walking into the office of China Wong, LCSW with his keys in his back pocket and his heart far from on his sleeve. The former of the two was exchanging transcontinental iMessages with Jem when he caught wind of an Oceanian accent and found himself staring at the massive man at the reception window, who was talking to the secretary in a low tone.

“I have an appointment scheduled for next Tuesday that I won’t be able to make. Is it okay if I reschedule for the following Tuesday?”

“Of course! What’s your name again?”

“Villiers. Cassidy Villiers.”

“Okay. Is 6:00 okay?”

“That works.”

“Okay! I’ll put you down for that time.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, Mr. Villiers.”

Then Cassidy was turning around and Mako was afforded the whole gorgeous sight of him, his long hair spun from gold and his almost offensively blue eyes. Mako watched, not entirely inconspicuously, as Cassidy crossed the waiting room, sat two chairs down from him, pulled out an iPhone, and began to scroll through a Twitter feed or some equally likely social media app. Mako bolstered his autistically fragile sense of social facility and opened his mouth to say something devilishly clever.

“You’re Australian.” So it wasn’t his best shot; sue him.

Cassidy looked up and searched momentarily for Mako; finding him, he blinked receptively. “And you’re from New Zealand.”

Mako’s mouth twitched. “How did you know?”

“The way you pronounce your vowels.”

“Exactly. ‘ _ Re-skee-dule _ ’? Dead giveaway.”

Cassidy released a breath that had the character of a laugh but did not fully approach it. He looked the way Mako always looked - exhausted in a normal way, in a manner that demanded constant sleep but not assertively enough to actually get it. “Of all the psych offices in all the towns in all the world, you had to walk into mine,” he uttered in cute, Casablancan fashion. “Don’t tell me you came to the States just for therapy.”

“I feel like you’re gearing up to a joke about how backwater New Zealand is and I’m here to tell you I’m not going to have it, Aussie.”

“So you’re oversensitive!” Cassidy pursed his lips momentarily. “Is that why you come to China?”

Mako produced a wry grimace of a smile and nodded his head slyly, grudgingly. “And you’re a dick,” he pronounced, blunt as anything. “Is that why  _ you _ come to China?”

At this, Cassidy grinned. It wasn’t the first time Mako had ever been dazzled by someone - we all recall Aroha and her particular brand of brain-melting, heart-stopping charisma - but Cassidy stood out amongst Mako’s gallery of faces that were so pretty they overwhelmed in the ineffable sadness of his expression, the way he could break a heart with all his teeth showing. 

“I’m curious,” Cassidy said, leaning into the two chairs’ worth of space that separated him from Mako. “When was the last time you cried in her office?”

Mako only considered the question for a fraction of a moment. “Last week.”

“You were talking about your ex-wife,” Cassidy guessed.

“Actually, I was talking about the time I ran across an island to get away from my mum.”

Cassidy’s expression became scrutinizing. “What did she do?”

“Oh, your run-of-the-mill emotional and verbal abuse a la Joan Crawford,” Mako offered with a mostly unpracticed casualness. “The screaming and the belittlement and the occasional beating.”

“The beatings were my favorite part, personally,” Cassidy said, smiling with a sort of faraway, dreamy look on his face that absolutely didn’t suit the conversation’s subject matter. “My dad used jumper cables.”

Mako, to his faint surprise, wasn’t shocked or horrified in the slightest. He didn’t react as any normal, well-adjusted human would have to such a revelation. Instead, he felt an embarrassing, instant flush of love for this man he didn’t know - love that waxed like the moon as he looked over Cassidy’s almost Abrahamic beauty and said, “Mum liked the switch.”

Cassidy’s brow furrowed. “Switch?”

“There was a totara tree in our backyard that had good grips for climbing. My mum would tell me to go up in that tree, get the skinniest branch I could find, and bring it back to her. Then she’d whip my arse with it.”

Cassidy had the audacity to look impressed. “So you had to participate in your own punishment,” he said, rubbing his fingertips thoughtfully over his bearded chin. “I love it. There’s something about that that just screams, ‘ _ fucked up for life _ .’”

“That’s right,” Mako replied evenly. “If my mum hadn’t beat me with the switch she made me go get myself, you might’ve never been graced with my presence.” When Cassidy narrowed his eyes just enough to be perceptible, curious and questioning, Mako parroted him - “Of all the psych offices in all the towns in all the world…”

“You’re a professor,” Cassidy said, guessing again. “History or art. Art history, maybe?”

Mako decided to play along. “You’re a washed-up rugby captain working as a bartender in the Tremé.”

“On the weekends you volunteer to help schizophrenic prisoners and homeless people because you think it’s total shit how mental illness is criminalized in this country.”

“Meanwhile you spend your weekends railing lines off the bathroom counter with the door guy at Santos.”

“You have PTSD and depression and sometimes you dabble in alcoholism, which you call self-medication both because it sounds better and because it’s true.”

“You go speed-dating on the reg and haven’t had a real relationship since you graduated from high school because that’s when romance got hard.”

Cassidy winced, his expression going smirky and strangely, intensely pleased. “ _ Ouch _ , mate,” he pronounced. “I thought  _ I _ was supposed to be the asshole.”

Mako was warm with self-satisfaction as he cocked his chin upward a notch and observed aloud, “I struck a nerve. Does that mean I was right?”

Cassidy’s smile deepened. “If this were the simplified, romantic comedy version of my life, you would be.”

“And what about this, the real life version of you?” Mako asked. “What’s he like?”

Cassidy’s face, which heretofore had been populated with such open amusement - him more than content to play with serrated hypotheticals and the nearly venomous flirtations of two men who truthfully didn’t even know of each other’s mutual queerness - became abruptly timid and unreadable. His lips parted preemptively - no words passing between them - and he fixed Mako with an odd look that brought to mind his words from less than a minute earlier:  _ fucked up for life _ . 

Then, before he could say anything, China’s cygnine form appeared in the door of her office and she said, “Hey, Mako. Come on in.”

Mako gave Cassidy a somewhat mournful look. New Orleans, despite its monstrous urban sprawl and population of just over one million, had the personality of a small village in the way that simply being its citizen made you best friends with just about everyone you encountered - at the grocery store, on the streetcar, across the street from your house, in your therapist’s office. Rising to his feet, Mako allowed his tone to read as hopeful as he said, “Tuesday after next?”

Cassidy smized. “You’re observant.”

“Just nosy,” Mako countered, then turned his back, retreated into China’s office, and promptly sealed Cassidy away into the neurotic and idolatrous part of his mind that would live on and on likely until the end of his life, or at least for the next eight years.


	25. 25

#  _ 25 _

In thirty-eight and a half years on planet Earth, Mako has learned that heartbreak doesn’t end. It just changes shape.

He wakes up on the second-to-last Wednesday in July with a sinus headache steadily negotiating its way into migraine territory. Brews coffee in an empty kitchen, smokes not one but two and a half cigarettes on the patio and saves the rest of the third for later, spits pink into the sink after he brushes, swallows three pills in one go. He botches putting his contacts in, wears his glasses for the day, passes the long hours at work in front of mystifying fake woke Medium articles, and listens to KC and Godfrey’s eclectic playlist of bass-heavy indie tunes and Motown throwbacks on the way home. He locks the Jetta with a carpal tunnel wrist and opens the front gate to Mum rolling around on the patio with half of her closet in her lap. She tosses her clothing onto the aluminum table and chairs with an uncharacteristic haphazardness, and this - the abnormality of it, the unexpectedness, the sight of this dying, cetacean woman at all - fills Mako to brimming with profound uneasiness. 

“What are you doing?” he asks, head still pounding over eight hours later.

Mum doesn’t spare him a glance, just swivels her wheelchair around to head back inside the house. “It’s time for a garage sale.”

Mako surveys the garments his mother has chosen to permanently dispense with. Three out of her total of seven muumuus, two of which were given to her as birthday presents in the preceding eight years. Her sole winter coat, a scarlet double-breasted number that cost ninety-six dollars and change. Handsome blouses, her favorite ikat and chintz and houndstooth. Almost every pair of trousers she owns, save for the sweats and the one really fancy pair of Italian wool crepe pants she wore to Gloria and Cynthia’s vow renewal ceremony four years ago.

It occurs to Mako, with a sinking vantablack feeling in his core, that Mum doesn’t expect to live to see the next occasion where she might wear a coat, a nice blouse, or pants. Every day, the imminent instance of her end comes around in some new, quaint way, and it’s silly, really - Mako should have known this was going to happen eventually, it’s happened before, it’s just the all too habitual behavior of life - but the little things like these funerary garage sales and the tallying up of goodnight kisses never fail to kill the gardens inside of him, herbicidal and mundane.

To feel useful, Mako goes upstairs and helps Kory comb through her room for all of the things she doesn’t want or need anymore. They dig baby pink and harlequin green articles out of her dresser, Kory scowling at them and declaring them too garish and girly even as she wears a tie-dye tank top and iridescent nail polish. They argue without heat about the abundance of stuffed animals - Build-A-Bears and sock monkeys and Webkinz and a Princess Diana Beanie Baby that Kory has literally had since New Zealand - and whether fifteen is too old to be playing with a village of cotton, terrycloth, and plush inhabitants (they ultimately decide that it isn’t, but put the Webkinz in the pile of discardables nonetheless). They linger over the uber cute gifts given to her by her mother during her tragic visit two months prior, Kory holding the fuzzy sweater in her hands with a look like crumpled paper on her full moon face.

“Your mum used to have a sweater like that when we were dating,” Mako notes.

“It doesn’t even fit me,” Kory says. Demonstrating, she pulls the nylon-acrylic article over her head and stretches it down as far as it will go over her pudge; it only reaches her belly-button, and she scowls. “Just because she’s like, size negative two doesn’t mean  _ I _ am.”

“You could wear it like a crop top,” Mako points out, threading Aroha’s carnelian beads through his fingers. “That’s in. You’re not too young to pull that off.”

“ _ Daddy _ , I’m a VSCO girl, not an Instagram baddie,” Kory says with an adolescent indignance that recalls Mako’s own in the early oughts, when he was so grunge it hurt. 

“I literally have no idea what those words mean.” Mako helps Kory tug the sweater back up over her head and tosses it on her bed with the other unwanted clothes without having to ask whether or not she wants it there. " _ Instagram baddie? _ Are you talking about those twentysomethings in bikinis who look like Kardashians and Jenners and like, get their asses injected with concrete?"

"They're so beautiful, it’s unreal," Kory observes dreamily.

"Okay, not to get all second wave feminist on you? But the fact that they’re unreal is precisely why they’re  _ not _ beautiful. Not that I as a man have anything to say about what constitutes physical beauty and why.” Mako gives Kory her beads and watches her twist them around her digits for a long moment before ultimately placing them back in her glitter-encrusted jewelry box. “You came from me, kid,” he says. “You’re lovelier than the whole lot of them. Thank Osiris, goddess of genetics.”

Kory squints at him. “There are so many things about what you just said that are just begging to be pulled apart.”

Mako opens his arms. “Pull ‘em apart for me, love.”

Kory does. They sit out on the patio with Mum, and Mako pulls out an unfinished, discarded Rothko-esque painting of his and marks out " _ GARAGE SALE _ " in red over the fields of yellow and blue. He places the sign in front of the gate and smokes the rest of his Marlboros while waiting for Crescent City hipsters, nosy housewives, and neighborhood tweens to come purchase Gehringer-Ngata junk with their money earned, borrowed, or stolen from menial service jobs, supportive husbands, and unknowing parents. A woman with fading purple and dishwater blonde hair drapes Mum’s houndstooth blouse over her arm, picks up Cassidy’s old copy of  _ Invisible Monsters _ , and asks Mako, “What’s the book about?”

Mako thinks about walking to Frady’s to get more cigs. “I’ve never read it.”

The woman gives him a look of  _ King and I _ puzzlement. “You’re selling it and you’ve never read it?”

“Returns from a breakup. After things ended I stopped having a reason to read it.”

Ametrine Hair has the nerve to look unimpressed. “You didn’t even want to read it just for the sake of it? Because it’s a piece of art?”

Distinctly unwilling to be judged on this day or any day and, perhaps, overreacting a little, Mako allows himself to go shark-eyed and say, “No, I’d rather read Buzzfeed listicles about hedgehogs and live the rest of my life without being reminded of my emotionally constipated ex or, for that matter, lectured by Zoomers about what I do with my very precious time.” He gestures to Mum’s blouse and the book. “Are you gonna buy that? It’s ten dollars.”

Ametrine Hair hands him two fives and leaves looking huffy. Mako reasons he is more like his mother than he really cares for, and this is ultimately what sends him to the convenience store to get more cancer sticks, shrimp po-boys for him and Kory, bread pudding for Mum, and the cheapest beer in the joint. When he gets back home, Jem’s Hyundai is parked on the curb next to his and the man himself is looking over the spread of Mum’s clothes with the same sort of dejected acceptance that Mako did earlier. Jem watches him sit down and light up his eleventh cigarette of the day, and when he leans down to drop a searching kiss on his mouth - the instance of this strange and somewhat miraculous, considering the bitter tobacco snake slithering out from between his lips and Jem’s longstanding distaste for his smoking habit - Mako evades him without thinking about it, catches Jem’s kisser with his cheek.

Jem looks at him, his expression withdrawn.

Mako doesn’t look back, just hands him the half of his po-boy he can’t finish.

The household makes one-hundred and twenty-five bucks. 

At 8:00, Mako declares himself thoroughly, clinically over it and goes to bed three hours early. 

It is part of his cycle. The funny thing about having both bipolar disorder and a fucked up life is never quite knowing whether a moment, day, week, or month of being in a shitty mood and enacting the correspondingly shitty behavior that comes with it is the result of the routine neurochemical machinations of your rat trap brain or the varied and assorted triggering events in your world. Three days ago, Mako was living, albeit in the exhausted, desperate fashion that has become the norm over the past fifteen years. Tonight, he feels in such a commonplace and boring way like he is ready to consume his entire bottle of hydroxyzine and beat his mother to life’s finish line. 

An ambiguous length of time later, Mako wakes to the sound of harsh vibration coming from the nightstand. Reaching blindly over to grab his phone, he expects to see KC or Robbie on the caller ID, them grasping into the night for his support through whatever bullfuckery is populating their lives at the moment. Instead, he reads  _ cassidy villiers _ off the screen and is greeted with a contact image that delivers his heart directly into the pit of his stomach: Cassidy on the right, eight years ago, smiling in that way that is so beautiful it offends; him on the left, kissing Cassidy’s face, gayer than the day is long.

He forgot to change this when he cleaned his phone out. He could kill himself for his absentmindedness.

Mako lets his phone ring for fifteen seconds - nearly long enough for the call to go to voicemail - before answering with a featureless, “Hello?” that he hopes telegraphs absolutely nothing about his state of mind.

There is an enceinte stretch of silence, then Cassidy’s baritone voice. “... hi.”

For a moment, they just listen to each other’s breathing. Mako turns his head to look at Jem's sleeping form, and cannot bring himself to tear his eyes away from the naked blade of the man’s shoulder, the pale, brownish constellation of moles on his mid-back.

Eventually, he asks, “Why are you calling?” This sounds a touch too aggressive and interrogative, so he modifies: “Are you okay?”

Cassidy hesitates before answering a second time. “No,” he says, then releases a laugh that verges on hysterical. “I’m not okay. Would I be calling you if I was okay?”

“I don’t… I don’t know,” Mako replies, marginally deadpan. “I don’t know you anymore.”

“Yes you do,” Cassidy says without missing a beat. “If you knew me then, you know me now, because I have achieved absolutely no character development over the past eight years.”

This, while unsurprising to Mako, still manages to break his heart a little. Feeling empathetic and uncomfortable, he jokes, “Join the club.”

“No, Mako, I am  _ fucked up _ . You’re getting married, you’re growing and changing - I  _ saw _ you changed the other day.” Cassidy’s breath comes as a broad, emotive gust over the line. “You’re… beautifully, elegantly changed,” he says, and the knot in Mako’s throat ossifies. “I’m not different at all.”

“You looked different,” Mako notes.

“Did I?”

“You were heavier.” This doesn’t quite capture what Mako is referring to, which is more than just Cassidy’s weight, crosses in fact into some intangible, unseeable but still fairly observable territory; he adds, “Softer.”

“I like Bittersweet Confections,” Cassidy says. “Ever since I stopped dating, they’ve been my sweetheart.”

Despite his aforementioned distaste for the meme, Mako blurts out, “Mood.”

Just as quickly, Cassidy echoes him. “Mood.”

Together, they laugh. It’s so stupid, it inspires further suicidality in Mako. He considers getting out of bed - not because he’s afraid of rousing Jem (because, as it has been said, the man will sleep through anything but that which he has specifically conditioned himself to wake up to), but because there’s something acutely distressing about talking to his ex with his fiancé sitting right there. Ultimately, he doesn’t move because he’s scared to leave Jem, his inadvertent rock in this moment of emotional turmoil.

Tenderly, sounding foreign to himself - this a voice he hasn’t used except on Kory in a long time - he asks, “What’s wrong?”

Cassidy pauses yet again, lets the time and the space pool between them until it is rich with meaning and dripping with his particular brand of bigendered emotional articulation, both incredibly forthright and incredibly grudging. Then he says, very quietly, “I’m alone.”

Mako closes his eyes and fights back the kneejerk urge to cry. At the moment, he doesn’t know why this hits this way, only knows that he feels alone too, hearing Cassidy say this. Unable and unwilling to say more, he replies with a sympathetic, “Yeah.”

“I’ve been alone for a long time. I don’t know why suddenly I can’t take it anymore.” Cassidy’s tone becomes slightly frantic as he asks, “You know I haven’t spoken with my son at all since I left Australia? Or my sister and brother? Julian is fourteen now. My brother is an actual doctor. And I don’t know them or have them at all. There’s no one.”

In what might count as the week’s crowning moment of jackassery - easily beating out earlier, when he avoided kissing Jem, and the episode on Monday when Stevie threw up in Jem’s shoes and not his and he said, “Thank you” - Mako asks, “Have you considered Tinder?”

Cassidy, having loved Mako’s casual malevolence literally since the moment they met, has the good grace to not sound offended. “Dating someone just so I’m not alone anymore? Isn’t that kind of pathetic?”

“Isn’t that the only reason people date?”

“No… people date because they like each other.”

“And because they don’t want to be alone.”

There is a desperation and a wryness to Cassidy’s tone when he asks, “Is that why you dated me?”

Mako sighs, immensely inconvenienced at having to answer this question. “Yes, Cassidy,” he says. “I liked you and I didn’t want to be alone.”

“But you weren’t alone,” Cassidy observes coolly. “You had your daughter and your mum.”

“Yeah, and my mum was always going to die before me and Kory was always going to grow up and go away to like, New York or San Francisco or some other place not doomed by climate change or Covid. I would have been alone eventually.”

Cassidy’s voice betrays no resentment when he asks, “So I was just your contingency plan?”

“No, that’s not-” Mako cuts himself off to make a throaty noise of frustration, to press a hand against his brow. “That’s not what I’m saying.”

“Well tell me what you mean. I’ve got all night.”

Mako briefly pulls his phone away from his face to check the time. It’s 3:19 in the morning;  _ dun dun dun _ , his brain sings.

“You’re really going to make me talk about this,” he utters bitterly once his phone is back in its proper place next to his ear and mouth. Closing his eyes against his displeasure: “I mean that I didn’t want to be alone, that I’ve never wanted to be alone, and the possibility of being alone has terrified me, has fucking plagued and dictated every action of my life since the moment me and my fiancée split… but that’s not the only reason why I started dating you. I didn’t look at you and say, ‘Oh, thank God, I’m not going to be alone because I have you.’”

“What did you say?”

“Cassidy, please don’t make me talk about this,” Mako pleads.

“I want to know.” Suddenly there’s a wet sniff over the line, and Mako realizes like he’s been punched in the throat that this big bad man of his is crying. Cassidy can beg too, and he does, not quite whining and leaning hard into the way Mako used to feel about him when he says, “Please tell me.”

Mako opens his eyes to glare at the ceiling, at God or the universe for putting him through this. “I said, ‘Look at this man that’s exactly like me,’” he concedes. “I said, ‘Let me take care of him.’”

Cassidy sniffs again. “So it was pity.”

“No,  _ fuck _ , Cassidy, it was love, okay? It was love.”

In the wake of this confession, there is more mutual breathing and silence. Mako puts a hand over his face and mouths, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” into the room - enraged with himself for saying this to Cassidy Villiers halfway through the witching hour with Jem right next to him. Cassidy is the first to make words happen again.

“You’re amazing, you know that?” is what he says. It sounds a little sarcastic, which inflates Mako’s fury.

“Oh,  _ fuck off _ , I’m hanging up-”

“No, no, I mean it.” Chuckling warmly in the undertone: “You’re… so full of love. I don’t know where it comes from. I wish I was like you.” “Because I’m not,” he doesn’t say.

“You  _ are _ like me,” Mako notes.

“No I’m not.”

“Cassidy, shut the fuck up and listen to me,” Mako snaps. “You are. You just refuse to see it. Hell, the fact that you refuse to see it makes you even more like me, because I get told good things about myself every day and I think it’s all just cleverly orchestrated bullshit meant to soothe me into complacency with a life that I was never made to live, working a nine-to-five, paying bills, being in love.”

“You always know how to describe things,” Cassidy purrs fondly, and Mako exhales all the air in his lungs, half-awake and plumb besotted.

“I know.”

“I miss that.” Another sniff. “I miss you.”

Mako wants to scream and cry. In a moment of vulnerability that will haunt him like his favorite ghost for months, he murmurs, “I miss you, too,” and he knows without even scrutinizing the statement that it’s true. He’s had intermittent periods of thinking really hard about Cassidy over the past eight years - periods that he’s deliberately brought to a close out of deep love for Jem and a desire not to succumb to complete emotional hara-kiri - and ever since he ran into Cassidy in the grocery store on Sunday, he’s found himself in dazes each day, wandering around the house and the office with his thoughts floating in the other man’s direction, his heartstomach a dull ache within him.

“Do you?” Cassidy asks. Before Mako can answer, he supersedes his first question with another one. “Can I see you?”

This is the most shocking thing he possibly could have requested. Mako blinks. “... now?”

“Yeah.”

Mako feels himself physically recoil from the idea of this, even as part of him wants to say, “Yes, please,” and run to Cassidy and hold his face in his hands and maybe even be touched by him, maybe even press their mouths and their bodies together, how awful this feeling is. He forces himself to go with his left-brain and say, “No. I’m engaged and I have work in five hours.”

Cassidy doesn’t give up there. “Can I see you soon, then? This weekend? I’m always free, you know me.”

Mako sighs heavily, audibly, letting Cassidy know just how unbearable he’s being. Eventually, when the silence crosses over from thoughtful into just awkward, he caves. “Okay.”

“Thank you. Thank you, oh my God.” Cassidy laughs, and the noise is strained, sad, permeated through and through with yearning. “I can’t wait.”

Mako doesn’t doubt it for a second. Signing off, he lies supine in bed and thinks of the past, of China’s waiting room, of The Other Bar in Uptown, of the eternal new moon that rose in his and Cassidy’s sky.

They discovered each other. Talking was never their strongest suit, but there was only so much they could do in their therapist’s lobby with the one cool Oceanian they’d ever met in New Orleans. It was Aries season, and the thermometer was pushing ninety, and on Tuesdays between 1:45 and 2:15 PM, Mako Gehringer and Cassidy Villiers wore Technicolor sunglasses and filled the space between them - two chairs, three years, the Tasman, and incalculable quantities of emotional maturity and experience - with the mundane and extraordinary junk of each other’s lives.

For example, Cassidy was informed during their second parley that Mako was not, as a matter of fact, a depressed, alcoholic art history professor with PTSD and a weekly appointment at NAMI; he was the autistic/bipolar father-cum-features editor at  _ Endymion _ that we’ve all come to know and love. Mako in turn learned that Cassidy’s drug habit was a thing of the past rather than the present and that he found employment in the daylight hours instead of the contrary - employment, in fact, as a glassblower in a studio on Magazine.

“A  _ glassblower? _ ” Mako permitted his expression to evince just how smitten he was with this. “That’s so friggin’ neat.”

“I’ll make you something,” Cassidy said in a way that struck Mako as non-serious and almost canine, the way he sought his approval without seeming diffident. “What’s your favorite animal?”

Unthinkingly, Mako babbled, “Dolphin. They’re so gay.”

Cassidy’s eyes narrowed a bit and the corner of his mouth curled upward. “I’m assuming the homosexuality is what you like about them.”

“Well, yeah,” Mako said with a tone that suggested that this was evident. He gestured indicatively to himself; his offensively pink sunglasses perched on top of his head; his floral button-down unbuttoned to halfway down his breastbone; his skinny jeans that were, in 2017, not a guaranteed beacon of his queerness as they would have been in 2006 but still intimated a trendiness, a metrosexuality, that could have placed him higher on the Kinsey scale. “I’m kind of into that, which you might have been able to tell from the  _ everything _ about me.”

Cassidy glanced at the floor, casual. “And here I thought I was flirting with a straight bloke this whole time,” he uttered with a touch of sarcasm, and there it was - concrete proof that their vicious repartee from two weeks prior hadn’t been free from amorous intent. 

Cassidy talked about AA. His inability to get past his ninth step, thanks to his phone plan and general unwillingness to embark on the Cassidy Villiers Apology Tour of Australia. At that moment, he didn’t tell Mako about dear old Mum and Dad, or even about Catherine and Baby Charley, but had no qualms with speaking about Rosalee Hollings Villiers and the glorious ways in which they’d wronged each other, which was supposed to scare Mako, but it didn’t. Unofficially divorced, (possibly, probably) emotionally unavailable, and some nebulous brand of abusive, Cassidy looked just as beautiful to him as Aroha did at Valhalla in 2009, and Mako’s romantic trauma from the previous relationship did nearly nothing to deter him from internalizing the man’s sung praises of Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous, from letting him dishonestly boost his Lumosity scores in the areas of Memory and Attention, from giving him his Crescent City number on April 4th, “in case [he] wanted to flirt in an extratherapeutic capacity.”

Cassidy smirked and didn’t text him for six days. On April 10th, with Mercury newly in retrograde, Mako fell out of bed an hour before his alarm, dropped his iPhone on Julia Street in the Central Business District and cracked the screen, troubleshot his turbulent Internet connection when he got home from work, and got back in bed nineteen hours after he’d tumbled out of it, wide awake, hypomanic without warning. He listened to  _ In Rainbows  _ and did a crossword puzzle on his phone for sixteen minutes until iMessage sprung to life with a new notification.

#    
  


**Monday, April 10 2017** 11:29 PM

**(504) 281-8449  
** Hey youre probably sleeping but im  watching fight club and this guy’s shirt is  literally exactly what you were wearing a  few weeks ago

This is Cassidy btw. Sorry for not texting  you sooner haha

#    
  


Embarrassingly, Mako’s stomach flipped - this the kind of dumb ass, uncynical infatuation he idolized a decade prior to that day, before he was a father with a failed major relationship under his belt. He agonized over his reply in the manner of a teenage girl for a few minutes.

#    
  


**mako gehringer  
** you’re lucky i’m hypomanic and totally wasn’t waiting for your text. it’s only been six and a half days, not that i was counting.

**cassidy villiers  
** Promise you wont be mad at me if i tell you about my week? :)

#    
  


Being, as he was, enamored, Mako felt generous. He dialed Cassidy’s number and let the man verbally reminisce about the past six days in somewhat formal fashion - about his whopping four attempts to blow a blue glass dolphin for Mako (all of which ended in lopsided failure), and his second Gentilly hit-and-run in as many months and the panic attack that quickly ensued (all the hard breathing into his steering wheel, the vertigo, the sensation that nothing - nothing at all - was real), and the twinned insomnia and anxiety that had had him up for forty-seven hours at the time of their conversation, and the constant urge to walk down to the corner of his street and buy a bag full of amphetamine or methcathinone or dextroamphetamine or even crystal for thirty bucks - and Mako lay there and listened and commented whenever appropriate - playfully lamenting the congenital deformities of his dolphins, offering sympathetic sorries in regards to the car accident and the sleeplessness, and asking, when Cassidy began to talk about his cravings, “How can you stand this city? It might just be the worst place to live in and be a recovering addict.”

“How can  _ you _ stand this city?” Cassidy shot back without heat. “You’re bipolar and autistic. You have triggers and bad habits just like me, and New Orleans is hell on wheels, full of talking, driving, drinking people. It’s the same thing.”

This, Mako conceded, made some sense. 

“Tell me about your week,” Cassidy said in a way that bordered the territory of offhandedly pleading. “Or your latest panic attack - either one.”

Mako laughed. The only person that heretofore spoke to him like this was KC, and we’ve already established how she’s always made him feel: lovesick, in that dangerous and exquisite way that threatened to break up marriages and crack the schizophrenic Crescent City pavement in two.

He talked about Kory. For seven years up until that point, she was the only thing in his life worth speaking about to normies and those interested in only the beautiful and industrious parts of his existence - she, his most magnificent production and the one part of him that was relatively untouched by heartbreak and mental illness; she, his first grader with puppy fat and an abundance of water in her natal chart. Because it was easy, because it made sense, he talked about the trivial paroxysms of his psychiatric ague - the slippage from the previous Monday, when he entertained fantasies of violent death and drank too much coffee to stay awake at work and spent hour upon blue hour in front of  _ Botched _ and  _ Sex and the City _ on E!, zonked out of his mind, zombie mode in full swing, to the Monday that was then just ending, when he was gritting his teeth through his anxiety and tonguing down two hydroxyzine every four hours and snapping at service people over the phone, sick of his subscription to  _ OffBeat _ , a thirty year old monster he didn’t like that he recognized. He talked about the various others in China’s waiting room - clients and patients of Rochelle Rinaldi, MD and Surendra Prakash, ARNP - and he and Cassidy took much pleasure in hypothesizing about their careers, backgrounds, and ailments - the Westie-looking fellow who was perhaps a Cluster B type who’d failed out of university; the elderly black woman with, Mako guessed, thirteen grandchildren and obsessive-compulsive disorder; the teenager with Titian hair who might have been a rare male case of bulimia; the Hispanic girl with the toddler in her lap, suffering maybe with narcolepsy or some other parasomnia. Then, he looked at the digital clock on the nightstand and read 1:45 AM. 

“How did we end up talking for two hours?” he asked. “It’s been like, fifteen minutes.”

Cassidy made a low, gelatinous noise over the line - a hum, maybe, vibrating right against Mako’s ear and swimming slowly down the center of his spine. “You wanna go to bed?”

Mako didn’t. He talked about his life until a quarter to four in the morning, went to work on a couple of hours of sleep, and then, at 1:50 PM in the lobby of Rochelle Rinaldi and Associates, shared with Cassidy companionable, blushing silence that was mediated only by their mutual exhaustion and the sweet  _ blip-blips _ of Tidal Treasures on Lumosity.

Nighttime was the right time. For the month of April, glissading into Taurus season and, eventually, out of Mercury retrograde, when the hours of writing, parenting, and tiredly grinding through a Northern Hemisphere existence came to a close at around the stroke of eleven, Mako wasted time with Cassidy. FaceTimed in bed with Cassidy. Listened to Dr. John and drove to pick up cigarettes in Mid-City with Cassidy. Hashed over suicide with Cassidy.

“I tried once,” he confessed in the direction of his dashboard, smoking a Marlboro that hung then out of the left side of his mouth. “Well, sort of. I had the idea and I was drugged up and ready to go through with it, but uh… the gun jammed, so to speak.”

Cassidy pulled his own cigarette out of his mouth and ashed it out of the open passenger-side window. “You used a gun?” he asked, face twisting in awe. “Kudos.”

“No, I was speaking metaphorically,” Mako said, merging onto the Westbank Expressway, which, as close to the midnight hour as it was, was not nearly as congested as it would have been twelve hours earlier. He plucked his Marlboro from between his lips, flicked the ash off onto the highway, and opted to elaborate in the most casual tone he could manage. “I was going to go drown myself and my kid in the Tasman but the car wouldn’t start. Something like that would make someone else believe in God, I guess, but it just made me tired.”

Cassidy’s responding facial expression didn’t even approach the degree of horrified any other person’s would have. He simply watched Mako as they slid together through the night, his eyes soft and wide awake with recognition and acceptance, and said, “I’ve got two tries under my belt. When I was seventeen, I crashed my mum’s car. Everyone thought it was just because I was drunk, which I was, but I knew what I was doing. I knew.” He paused to take a drag off his cigarette, then continued. “Then I was twenty-four years old and trying to overdose on heroin,  _ Pulp Fiction _ style. I had good friends, though, and an even better paramedic.”

Mako bugged his eyes at the dark ribbon of the road before him - not judgmental, just a little stupefied. “There’s something about drug overdose in particular that is just so deeply terrifying,” he mused aloud. “You can literally  _ feel  _ your body doing the wrong thing - the thing a normal, healthy body isn’t supposed to do - and you made that choice for yourself, sure, but it’s still so much scarier than instant death would be. It takes its time setting in. You get to watch it happening. You get to think about what you did to yourself. You get to regret it.”

“Did you regret it?” Cassidy asked.

“Trying? Yeah, when it came to my kid. But for like a year after it happened, I regretted not dying more than anything.” Mako put his cigarette back into his mouth and laid both hands down on the steering wheel at ten and two o’clock, drinking in the late spring Deep South humidity and the secrecy of the moment. Around the butt of his Marlboro, he said, “Sometimes I still wish I could have disappeared forever, before all of the things that have happened to me since then happened. Sometimes I wish I never ever was.”

Cassidy - who had touched Mako before but only circumstantially, fingers brushing with his as they passed Mako’s phone back and forth in China’s waiting room or when he’d taken the cigarette Mako had offered to him minutes earlier - reached across the center console to press his palm against Mako’s lower thigh. The rare, highly significant touch of his hand made Mako want to close his eyes and savor it to the exclusion of all other sensation, but he kept his gaze firmly ahead as Cassidy said, “I hate that I lived every day. Every day something happens and I just look at myself and say, ‘Why in bloody hell are you even still here? Why did you of all people get to be so lucky?’”

“You don’t believe in a higher power?” Mako asked.

“The devil is real,” Cassidy said in a manner that verged on wry and thoroughly, utterly serious. “A God of love, though? Maybe not.”

Smoke filled Mako’s head, nicotine and honesty sharpening his senses, enlivening him. Cassidy hadn’t yet moved his hand; thinking very hard about it, Mako lowered his own hand to rest atop the other’s, his fingers curling around the edge of Cassidy’s palm. At that moment, he could have given in to the part of him that had grown very neurotic since the breakdown of his and Aroha’s romance, the part of him that demanded certainty in all aspects of his life, and asked Cassidy to talk not about his moth-eaten self-hatred and his theological belief system but about what was happening between them - this thing that existed mostly after the sun went down, had no concrete name or analogous Facebook relationship status, and made him feel like he was about ten years younger and exponentially stupider than he really was - but instead, he drove all the way to the Sonic Drive-In in Harvey and ordered two Route 44 Ocean Waters, of which he watched Cassidy, recovering addict, pour about a third out onto the parking lot and spike with Taaka. They could have just gotten daiquiris on St. Charles and avoided the trip to the suburbs altogether, of course, but then they wouldn’t have spent upwards of thirty minutes in the car together, and this time that pooled between them - viscous fluid, colored like blood - was what they were living on in those days.

Cassidy asked him, “Do you think people are good or bad, deep down? That they’re born either way?”

Mako looked at the road, at the light-polluted sky. The darkness of the car and the night and the conversation itself engendered so much love between them. “I think we’re more complicated than just  _ good _ and  _ bad _ , but deep down exists,” he said. “I’m always going to be the way I am. Born this way, and all that bullshit.”

Cassidy slurped electric blue through his straw and watched him with eyes that held so much weight within them, all that mass they couldn’t measure. “So you don’t think it’s possible to get better,” he replied. It wasn’t a question.

Mako, who had only felt alive for the prior seven years when he was being touched - and were it not for Kory, he wouldn’t have been touched at all - shook his head. “Not really.”

This answer seemed to satisfy Cassidy, who was the most beautiful pessimist Mako had ever known. They drove back to New Orleans proper, and they got tipsy, and their palms did not have the audacity to commune over the center console, but the space between them was an illusion affected by their shared masculinity and fear that anything, everything would go wrong. That was the first night Mako didn’t help himself to Cassidy. The first night he didn’t kiss him, didn’t slide into his lap or grind their hips together or lick his way into his mouth like the imaginary video loop in the back of his mind played back to him like beautiful torturous wish fulfillment every hour and a half or so. That was the first night he felt oddly hollow inside for his abstinence, his body ringing with emptiness like a vase every time he knocked it against something, bumping into furniture and doorways and Annie at the office. That was the first night he told himself, “No.”

He liked Cassidy so much it made him sick. He woke up each morning ready to sink shaking to his knees and vomit, how crazy he was about this man that was made of the same stuff as him. He, who had been celibate in a primarily incidental way for the prior seven years and had not felt the stirrings of true lust toward anyone in all that time - not even Jem - sat at work and in the car and on the patio and in his bed and thought long and hard about himself on his elbows and knees with Cassidy looming over him, his dick sliding in wet and filthy along the line of his ass, Mako like a cat in heat in his white hot frenzy for penetration, for the weight of another man on him. 

On the first Friday in May, after just over a month of them dancing around each other, Cassidy called Mako as he was getting off of work.

“Would you call yourself in an enabling mood?” he asked without saying hello.

Mako surveyed his steering wheel and the lei of silk orchids hanging from his rearview mirror. The Jetta’s air conditioner was broken and, in the advanced state of the Louisiana spring, blew nothing but hot air from its vents. “It’s Friday and I’ve been bored for over half a decade,” he said. “Ergo, maybe?”

“Take me out. There’s a bar in Uptown that’s having an open mic tonight and will let me bring my dog inside.”

Mako scratched idly at his brow. “You’re going to have to do better than amateur musicians and your fucking dog, mate,” he said - not so much because he was especially uninterested, but because playing hard to get was his only recourse against being a totally lovesick idiot.

“I’ll pick up the tab.” 

“Hmm,” Mako hummed.

“They have the Turbodog Abita you told me you wanted to try.”

“Hmm?”

“Skeeball.” Cassidy’s hopefulness was impossible, drugging. “Board games. Dat Dog is across the street. I’ll buy you a Guinness-infused bratwurst.”

“Okay,” Mako finally conceded. “One beer, maybe two.” Which was how he came to be sleeping, naked, in Cassidy’s bed at half past two o’clock the next morning.

He hadn’t set out to sleep with Cassidy that night. Despite his generally impatient nature and the magnitude of his attraction, he could have gone on skirting hand-holding in the car, texting aimlessly about dinner plans, and videochatting before bed for weeks, months, even years longer, how old he was, how profound was his disillusionment with love. On May 5th, though, he took Cassidy to The Other Bar on Freret and got shitbombed with his Australian crush with four Turbodog Abitas and a boilermaker. He lost two out of three rounds of skeeball and won the game of Catan he and Cassidy played with the Brazilian couple sitting at the bar beside them. He was led by the hand to Dat Dog and treated to a Guinness dog topped with Chicago sweet relish, jalapeños, mayonnaise, and grilled onions. Retreating back across the street to the bar, he drank another beer and sat with Cassidy in the grimy violet corner of the room, listening to female-led indie pop outfits and English majors from Loyola wax poetical about love, contraception, and New Orleans in front of the microphone set-up.

“Last night, I had a dream of you holding Miles on your chest in the Audubon grass, him small and sick and snotty the way he was the day I walked you to the parking garage on your way home from work.” The five-foot nothing androgyne at the fore of the room had a Louisiana voice and a presence like an old water stain that gave a wooden coffee table character. “And when you opened your eyes, the light bled out of them like kintsukuroi gold.”

Sitting next to Cassidy, not across the table from him but close enough to his left side to bump his shoulder with his own, Mako pulled off of the sepia lip of his beer bottle and glided his fingers easy through Cassidy’s golden retriever’s fur.

“And when you opened your mouth, Maurice Ravel came out.”

Reaching over Mako’s lap for Beau, Cassidy’s hand alighted on Mako’s left thigh, farther from the knee joint and closer to the pelvis than he’d dared to touch two weeks before.

“And then you turned into a blind sphinx cat with a lil booger kitten.”

Mako didn’t let their prolonged physical contact get anything but nice and comfortable in the low purplish light of the bar, like they needed to have a whole lot more of it in their lives.

“And if you asked me what the universe was trying to tell me, I couldn’t answer,” the poet said. “I would just buy you a strawberry daq with extra rum and tell you stories about Osiris, and that would have to be enough.”

Outside the bar, an Etta James cover rang in Mako’s ears, tingling in his skin when Cassidy stood behind him, pressed against his back, and clutched at his biceps for a moment before stepping around to face him. He smelled sweet whiskey on Cassidy’s breath and the citrusy hand soap from the bar bathroom on his hands, exhaust from the pickup truck rolling down Freret alongside them, Beau’s doggy scent from where he hovered at their feet. Things got unreal, fuzzy, fast as he looked up into Cassidy’s dizzyingly blue eyes and, thinking too much of it, ran a hand through his own graying hair before putting that same hand in Cassidy’s hair, brushing one long blond tendril behind the man’s ear.

“Are you drunk?” Cassidy asked, slurring not at all.

“Yes,” Mako replied after a moment of self-eval. 

“Me too.” Cassidy caught Mako’s hand and held it to his chest. “So it would be totally sketchy if I kissed you right now, right? That’s clinically inadvisable behavior.”

Mako stared at his hand on Cassidy’s chest, at Kory’s lime green lacquer chipping off of his nails, at his fingers splayed wide over Cassidy’s breastbone and the black pond of fabric rippling beneath his palm. Rather than offering a verbal response, he surged forward and up and pressed his lips to Cassidy’s - not chastely, but not particularly passionately either, his kiss purely inquisitive, probing. When he started to pull back, he was only half-surprised that Cassidy followed him with an open, searching mouth, turning their liplock from a question into an answer.

“Oh my God, you are so sexy,” Cassidy said into his mouth, stupid beyond belief, putting a hand in his hair and holding him close as if he was afraid he was going to fly away into the heat of the night. “You could have me if you want. That’s an invitation.”

Mako leaned his forehead into Cassidy’s. Breathed hard. Attempted to put the boozy clusterfuck of his feelings into words. “You don’t have hepatitis, do you?” 

WOW that was the wrong thing to say.

Cassidy, bless his soul, just laughed and shook his head and kissed Mako again with a desperation that did so much to drive Mako insane. “Come home with me,” he pressed, sounding like a little boy. “Please.”

Always begging, hands up and open to the sky.

Always the needy one, Mako’s second self in this way.

There was no doubt that they were going to engage in carnal relations. Arriving at Cassidy’s Mid-City dwelling sometime after eleven, Mako watched Cassidy fill Beau’s water bowl in the kitchen and then shut the bedroom door on the curious canine before turning to him with a keen, beseeching sort of look and saying, “Tell me what to do.”

Mako, who’d long had a somewhat dominant bent to his sexual proclivities but was never too explicit about it, felt slightly uneasy with his newfound authority yet issued the order nonetheless: “Take off your shirt.” When Cassidy did as he was told and revealed to the ninety-degree night his golden, leonine musculature - his skin sticky with the barest sheen of sweat beneath his heavy black T-shirt, him at six feet-three inches and two-hundred and twenty pounds almost too big to be real - Mako felt his mouth go perfectly dry and said, borderline asthmatic, “Yeah, uh. Bring all that over here.”

Cassidy did, eager in a doggy manner, wholly devoid of hesitation. Mako kissed him with the mouth of evening and drew his hand down his abdomen, lower and lower, until his fingers rested on the button of Cassidy’s jeans. With a thoroughly uncalculated intensity, Mako reached into Cassidy’s pants and fisted his dick like he was in university - beautifully, avidly smart and sexual and able - and there was a pull so sharp in the pit of him that he felt as though it would rip his stomach clean open, spill his guts slippery and gross right into Cassidy’s waiting hands because holy shit, he wanted him. Holy shit, it was going to kill him, the sheer pressure between his muscle and epidermis, Cassidy lapping at his pierced nipple in the insistent way of a thirsty dog, the power he had over this person that he liked so much, the unbearable hunger for skin and kiss and ah and closer.

Cassidy kept his eyes closed during sex. It didn’t strike Mako as significant then, when they were naked as if for the first time ever and he crawled on top of Cassidy like some kind of dark animal and dug his dick into the inside curve of the man’s left hip, when they frotted against each other like teenagers and Mako dipped his head down to catch Cassidy by the mouth and the motion of their bodies quickly became seismic instead of simply tidal. Sweat-slickened and fast in a world of white, Mako felt every muscle in his body turn to stone when Cassidy, clinging to him for dear life, sealed his teeth around the meat of his shoulder and bit down hard enough to draw pinpricks of red to the surface of his skin. In the aftermath, stone metamorphosed into jelly, he laid on top of Cassidy with his face in all of the man’s beautiful blond hair, and the electric fan blew hot air over his naked backside, and Beau pawed noisily at the closed door, and he slept, saying nothing.

He woke three hours later with a throbbing head and an unpleasant seminal tackiness against his belly. His first thought, blinking until he clearly perceived Cassidy’s dozing face in the dark, was of Kory, who slept then in his house alongside the Mississippi River and silently awaited the Saturday morning moment when he’d wake her up armed with chocolate chip pancakes and a kiss or two. His second thought was of Jem, who was sitting down to dinner seventeen time zones away, who texted him news of the doppelganger he encountered in downtown Wellington, who was in love with him still. 

This selfsame feeling of infidelity is subletting Mako’s heart on July 26, 2025, when he steps into the master bedroom where Jem is propped in front of his Kindle at 5:34 in the afternoon and says, “I’m going to go get a drink with Godfrey.”

Jem doesn’t look up when he says, “Tell him I said hi.” 

Mako nods and walks out of the room. He makes it halfway down the stairs before turning right around and going back to tell Jem, “I lied. I’m going to see Cassidy.”

This time, Jem raises his eyes to Mako’s. “Okay,” he says, in that inscrutable and toneless way that absolutely flummoxes.

“Please tell me what you’re thinking,” Mako pleads. In his head: “Tell me you hate this. Tell me not to go.”

Jem’s right shoulder pops up in a momentary shrug and his smile is so subtle it is nearly imperceptible. “I’m not thinking anything.”

This response is worse than it would be if it was an outright negative. Mako goes to linger for an instant by the bed, to take Jem’s hand and squeeze his fingers until he wordlessly squeezes back, then heads downstairs, out of the house, and into the tropical cockpit of the Jetta. He stops by Frady’s to pick up a pack of menthols, then smokes three of them in the time it takes to stick himself back in the driver’s seat and arrive in Mid-City. 

Driving down Canal and the sidestreets thereafter is surreal. Every asphalt crackle, pothole, and speed bump is at once intimately familiar and foreign in the manner of an alien nation, the live oaks and the mosses appreciably unchanged from years before, the same tangerine station wagon parked in front of the same puce house. Mako rolls up to Cassidy’s shotgun on Banks and feels his heart lodged like a hot nodule in his throat, his anxiety so much as to damn near lock his legs, and he realizes, stepping out of his car, flicking his final cigarette to the ground, and stubbing it out with one Converse-clad toe, that he’s literally trembling with dread. This is absolutely idiotic, he thinks to himself.

When he knocks on the door, he is immediately greeted by a barrage of barks from behind it. Thirty seconds of this and the door comes open, and there is Cassidy, looking so stupidly gorgeous, and Beau, immediately crowding into Mako’s space and not jumping on him as a lesser dog would have, just pushing his golden face into his hands.

“Oh my God!” Mako goes to his knees and lets himself kiss and be kissed by Beau, his anxiety dissipating just that little bit. “Oh my goodness, it’s my favorite dog!” He allows his eyes to find Cassidy’s in the midst of this. “Do you think he remembers me? Or is he just being Beau?”

“Oh, he remembers you.” Cassidy gives him that grin that has always made him feel as if his head, heart, or loins are going to just explode; he closes his eyes for a moment, overwhelmed. “He’s an old dog, but he’s still sharp.”

For a moment, it’s just Mako getting his cuddle on with Beau and Cassidy watching them, happy as anything. Eventually, though, Cassidy says, “I was actually just about to take him for a walk.” In a subthreshold way only Mako would be able to recognize, he looks hopeful. “Do you want to come with?”

Mako doesn’t think. He says, “Yeah, okay.” So they go for a walk.

Strolling along Banks, past the Jose Marti monument and the taffy-colored houses and among the tree boughs curving serpentine above, Mako offers Cassidy a cigarette because old habits die hard and it’s too easy to fall back into their usual customs, him wanting in a half-assed and thoroughly shitty sort of way to extend that resumption into putting his hand in Cassidy's back pocket and giving him a moderately filthy kiss. After pausing in their southwestern advance so that Cassidy can cup a hand around his menthol while Mako lights it, Cassidy remarks, “I thought you would have quit by now.”

Mako’s responding expression is sheepish. “I vaped for a long time, actually. I started smoking again after, uh, after Mum got sick.” He doesn’t sink into the Earth upon saying this; small victories. “The urge to self-destruct was just too powerful to resist, but of course I couldn’t do anything dramatic like cut myself or stick my head in the oven. I have a family, after all. Smoking was just bad enough.”

“I understand completely,” Cassidy intones, and he would. He would understand more than almost anyone Mako knows.

For around a minute, give or take, ex-boyfriends just walk together wordlessly, attaching themselves to the foliage and the traffic and Beau. Then, remembering himself and the rules of polite society and their abandoned relationship, Mako asks, “How are you? I mean really - how are you? No bullshit.”

“I’m… awful.” Saying this pulls a dark laugh out of Cassidy, and Mako gets it, gets it so hard. Cassidy guards his pain fiercely, protects it from the world with a vengeance and almost doesn’t even know how to show his hurt to others, but for some reason, he has always come to Mako like a wound, bloody and raw and begging alternately for reactions of tenderness and disgust. He runs a hand through the top of his loose hair and says, “It’s recently dawned on me that almost two decades of acting like a selfish asshole has gotten me farther rather than closer to not dying alone, and surprisingly? I don’t want that. That’s terrifying.”

Mako, lighting up his fourth cigarette in the deepening blue of the late afternoon, pulls the fag from his mouth and asks, “When did you get that memo?”

“Sunday when I saw you at Whole Foods.” Cassidy doesn’t look at Mako head-on, but Mako can see the wry amusement in his face, the almost grudging nature of his mirth. “It had been in the post for a couple of years, but then I was thirty-six for two weeks and you were there and you were engaged despite everything in your life, and it just hit me. I’m halfway through my life and I’m alone.”

Mako grasps for something to say. Sympathy floods him, but he’s afraid of appearing too soft after their Wednesday night phone call. He takes a long, almost nauseating drag of his cigarette to think, then dumbly offers, “I know that has to hurt.” 

“No kidding.” Cassidy makes to turn onto Jefferson Davis Parkway, and the air sits hot and humid and still on top of them; the streetcar hurtling noisily, metallically in the distant background; the hipsters of New Orleans skipping their way across the street. A look overcomes Cassidy that scares Mako, having been the harbinger of perfect, sometimes even harsh honesty in the past; he asks, “Can I tell you something fucked up? It’s going to upset you.”

Mako concedes a snorting laugh. “At least you’re honest about it.” He throws his head back. “What the hell, hit me with it.”

Cassidy blows a thick anaconda of smoke into the sweltering, inert air and watches Beau momentarily push his nose into a fern alongside the sidewalk before moving on, uninterested in the banal. He says, “For three years after we broke up, I slept around with everyone. I got chlamydia three times. I was in a dark, lonely place even though I was almost always surrounded by people, I was in a hole so deep I could drill for oil, and it didn’t feel like your run-of-the-mill depression. It felt more violent.” 

This, to his full surprise, inspires swift rage in Mako; he doesn’t quite know why. He thinks, “Is this supposed to be _ my  _ fault?”, thinks, “Did you learn nothing?”, thinks, “Grow up.” He says none of these things, says nothing at all.

“Then it was October again,” Cassidy continues. “I woke up one day and…” Here Cassidy adopts an abrupt, profound and pregnant silence, and Mako knows this, the nearly physical pain that comes with his vulnerability. Cassidy gazes longingly into the street and says, “You were the only thing I could think about. You accepted my fucked up sleeping habits and sat with me when I had anxiety attacks. You didn’t care if we went to the same Chinese place every other night for a month and then never went back. You wore my clothes and finished my coffee and never judged me for being depressed or anxious or just a shitty person in general, and I looked for you everywhere in everyone after you split.”

“Did you find me?” Mako asks, not wanting to know the answer.

“Of course not.” In a sudden cloud of jasmine scent, Cassidy glances sideways at Mako, and he’s never told him with words that he loves him, but he’s wearing the same look he used to give him in the suffocating intimacy of the night - a look of absolute terror, and pain, and single-minded tenderness that in the past preceded him lovingly fucking Mako into mindless oblivion. “You’re nothing like anything or anyone in the Northern Hemisphere, if not the whole world.”

Mako cannot bring himself to believe or be touched by such utter horseshit. Evincing this, he rolls his eyes back into his head and groans with unmitigated revulsion, “Oh my God, shut up.”

“No, I’m serious,” Cassidy retorts with a smile that Mako immediately recognizes as nervous. “You’re insane and insanely loving and like, somehow functional all at the same time, and that’s crazy how important that is. Why else would you be in this city? Why else would you have been in my life and left me?”

Mako, for whom love is the most vital thing in the world, smokes his Marlboro and refuses to look at Cassidy. His heart is beating fast and there is electricity just inside his skin, being this close to his ex-love who is suffering, who is bleeding pleading begging for his proximity and who he knows wants his kiss, his touch, his conscientious infidelity to Jem. When he knows he can open his mouth without vomiting due to chain-smoking and emotional turbulence alike, he asks, with this forthrightness that has been wrung reluctantly out of him so often lately, “Why did you ask to see me today?”

Cassidy doesn’t say anything for several prolonged moments. They arrive at the intersection of Jefferson Davis and Bienville and Beau squats near a shrub surrounding a sun-bleached fire hydrant to defecate. As Cassidy inverts a bright blue baggie and sticks his hand not holding his cigarette butt inside to pick up the long sausage turd appropriately sized for a large dog like Beau (and thus significantly rather than just marginally disgusting), he sighs long and hard and says like the admission might kill him, “I wanted you back. Back in my life, in my house, in my bed, in every way. I knew I wasn’t going to get you, but I was - no, am - stupid and thought, ‘Okay, maybe I’ll see him once and get him out of my system, or we can be friends, or whatever.’”

Mako drops his finished cigarette to the pavement and grinds the cherry dead with his heel. “What’s the verdict on that one?”

Cassidy ties off and then dangles the shit baggie impotently in the air. “I don’t know,” he utters with a chuckle, not looking at Mako. “You’re here and it’s like, everything, so I don’t think I’m going to get over you.”

“You mean you’re going to keep calling me in the middle of the night, crying and begging me to come over?” Mako asks.

“Maybe,” Cassidy replies. He stands at the edge of the sidewalk and finally meets Mako’s eyes, which makes Mako want to look away, but he doesn’t. “What do you think about that?”

Mako abruptly wants a coffee from Rue de la Course or Mojo on Freret. He wants to go home and see Kory’s old toys in the bathtub, the ones they gave to Goodwill when she turned thirteen and decided she was too old for raspberry-colored rubber duckies and squirting  _ Finding Nemo _ fish. He wants to lie on his back and spread his thighs. He raises his hand grasping into the middle of the air between them and waits for Cassidy to take it hesitantly before he says, “Take me to Bayou St. John.”

Cassidy smiles a little and does. They stand on the bayou’s grassy bank, and the sun hanging low but still insistent in the sky is weird, of course - they used to do this at night when the crackheads and the gutterpunks came out of the woodwork - but with Beau sitting at Cassidy’s feet and Cassidy’s beefy arm around Mako’s shoulders, holding him close, Mako’s face in his neck and the water a halcyon antithesis to what exists between them, it’s eight years ago, with them totally crazy and trying hard (and failing) not to let it get too bad.

They went to Whole Foods back then, too. Perused the aisles for gnocchi dumplings and Parmigiano-Reggiano and tomato sauce and basil leaves, which Mako would arrange into something not only edible but quite delectable and put in front of Cassidy, Mum, and Kory in gold-rimmed pasta bowls they couldn't put in the microwave. On weeknights where Mako’s blood pressure would border on skyrocketing from the stress of work and parenting and living with his aging, bitchy, intermittently abusive mother, Cassidy stroked him off in the shower while he tried to look everywhere but at Kory’s aforementioned bathtub toys and just focus on Cassidy’s thick, callused fingers on his dick, him sucking a possessive rose into the blond’s golden neck. On a Tuesday in June, when Cassidy texted Mako from work that his day was, quote, “such shit,” Mako made the trip from the Central Business District to the Sonic in Harvey and then to Wehunt Glassworks and Printmaking Studio on Magazine to feed him French fries and a large strawberry cheesecake Master Shake while he waxed philosophical about glassblowing, how the point was rarely perfection - it was fluidity, it was artistry, it was flexibility up until the very last moment when everything crystallized into something beautiful. The next week, Cassidy visited Mako at the Endymion office with a box of District Donuts, and it was so rich, so sweet, Mako didn’t know what to do with himself and ate nothing for the rest of the day.

On a night where they slept in separate houses, Mako went downstairs to get a glass of water. Halfway through his descent, Stevie skittered past his ankle, which came twisting down hard onto the next step at an unnatural angle. It took two more seething steps for Mako to definitively decide that yes, something was on the verge of if not past breaking; he limped slowly, gaspingly into the living room, dining room, and then kitchen to get a Ziploc full of ice cubes and a dishcloth, which he pillowed against his bruising ankle on the sofa while he tried for (and mostly fell short of) sleep. The following morning, he called in sick to work and texted Jem from the ER at five o’clock in the morning Wellington time.

#    
  


**Friday, June 30 2017** 12:39 PM

**mako gehringer  
** please tell me you’re awake i’m in the er

**jeremiah tui  
** WTF are you okay???

YES I’m awake I just got up

What happened

**mako gehringer  
** i fucked my ankle up at like 2:30 in the morning, cross your fingers for me that it’s not broken

why are you up so early/late?? what time is it where you are?

**jeremiah tui  
** 5:42 AM. I have a dental appointment at 6:30 blegh

What were you doing at 2:30, running a marathon? Why are we just interrogating each other, is this our friendship now?

**mako gehringer  
** i’m obsessed with video essays about film rn so i was binging on youtube and i decided to get a glass of water  and the cat tripped me on the stairs on the way down

**jeremiah tui  
** What films? :~)

**mako gehringer  
** fight club LMFAO

hercules

casino royale

cassidy and i have been watching stuff and deconstructing masculinity in them yknow just little boyfriend things

**jeremiah tui  
** Mako, can you do me a favor?

**mako gehringer  
** yeah sure

**jeremiah tui  
** Don’t take this the wrong way

I need you to not talk about Cassidy for five hours. I’m not mad at you, I just need this, is that okay?

#    
  


Mako stared at his phone for two minutes that felt like two years. He internalized the sting that followed Jem’s request, pushed it far down inside him until it appeared to him as a pinprick of red light at the nadir of a dark, descending tunnel within him. He texted Jem back. 

#    
  


**mako gehringer  
** of course! i don’t mind :) 

#    
  


Mako did mind. His X-ray came back indicating no breakage and he was sent home with an ACE bandage and a pair of crutches. 

Saturday came and Cassidy arrived at the Gehringer-Ngata residence to baby Mako. In the afternoon, Mum took Kory to walk in City Park and possibly procure ice cream and beignets at Morning Call, and as soon as the click in the door, Cassidy was knocking Mako’s crutches out of his lap and had him twisting in his tree trunk arms like a cat and groaning into his kiss, abruptly wild with hunger and not at all helpless. Mako thought he would die from both embarrassment and adoration when Cassidy took him into his arms and carried him bridal style up the stairs and into his bedroom; there was something both incredibly humiliating and incredibly intoxicating about, being a man yourself, getting carried to your boudoir by a man who was over six feet tall, built like a brick wall, and consciously subject to your will. 

During the week, things would have gone differently. During the week, they would have waited through the agonizing hours of daylight and some of the nighttime before disappearing into bed, into quiet and tender yet no less feverish lovemaking, Cassidy a hot pantherlike animal between Mako’s legs, all the breathy kissing. On the first day of the weekend, however, while Mum and Kory partook in the family friendly delights offered by the Crescent City, it was loud fucking like dogs until they couldn’t do anything but nap naked under an electric fan in the summer heat, Cassidy kissing Mako’s sleepy back and buttocks and the place where the ACE bandage pinched tightest around his ankle, laughing when Mako jumped.

Mediocre sex doesn’t exist. The three accepted categories are phenomenal, great, and bad. Mako had had his fair share of bad sex in high school and university with random, faceless nobodies with whom he discovered his strange sexual affliction: bisexuality. He had had great sex with Tatum and with Aroha, whom he loved. He had never experienced phenomenal sex until Cassidy, who started the hydraulic engine of his desire simply with his sometimes mysterious facial expressions and the touch of his bare hand, who wanted to be controlled and dominated - to give himself over wholly - or alternately to hold Mako down and give him everything he had until he screamed. Mako understood this not at all. All he knew is that a single instance of visual or physical contact with Cassidy awakened his body to itself and left him haunted, inspirited, revved up as if he was a purely mechanical being, his default state inanimate. On that first Morning Call, walking through City Park day in July, he dozed for a couple of hours and then peeled himself out of bed with Cassidy his shadow, dressed himself in gym shorts and his gayest kimono, and limped downstairs and out of the door to shiver violently in the savage summer heat and smoke cigarettes and shoot the shit with his boyfriend until Mum and Kory came home with beignets in a white Styrofoam container.

He thought of Jem. He thought of Jem so much.

Mako and Cassidy stayed driving through the night to and with each other. They stayed wandering to Bayou St. John with Beau. Cassidy told Mako of his suicidally careless forays into benzodiazepines and opioids, and when they got back to his place and Mako dragged his duvet up over his shoulder and leaned down to kiss him goodnight before heading back to the Bywater, Cassidy placed his hands on the back of Mako’s neck and said, “Stay.”

Mako mentally flipped through the next day’s agenda. “Kory has ballet tomorrow, you know.”

Cassidy looked undeterred as he said, “I know.”

“I’ll have to leave early, you know.”

Cassidy’s fingers slid enticingly against Mako’s nape. “I know.”

Mako felt, as he so often did, ripped in opposite cardinal directions. With a quiet sigh, he nudged Cassidy and murmured out a quiet, “Scoot.”

Cassidy obliged and waited while Mako pulled his pants and shirt off to slip beneath the covers with him. They watched each other for a long moment, inches apart and not touching. Eventually, Cassidy reached out to caress Mako’s face, prompting the spill of hot syrup within him, Mako closing the distance between them, the kiss that had his spine ready to retire and become a liquid. Mako set an alarm on his phone before dropping off to sleep. 

What felt like five minutes but was actually six and a half hours later, Mako awoke to his iPhone’s digital chiming. He rolled onto his back in the receding darkness and took in Cassidy’s slumbering form, the casual spill of flaxen hair over his pillow and face. He was his boyfriend - his huge, sexy, sweet, funny, amazing boyfriend - and they were either going to end up together and saddled high with distrust and sexual dysfunction, or they were going to wind up apart and, hopefully, friends. Mako was lucky, and unworthy, and terrified, and he might have just loved Cassidy. 

The weekend that followed, KC texted the c-c-crew group chat.

#    
  


**Saturday, July 22 2017** 6:15 PM

**kc ramsey  
** hey who wants to go to oz and TURN TF UP tonite

they always have great dance music and if yall are up to it drag bingo is tonight as well :^)

(this is mostly directed at mako glo and june since my husband is boring and hetero and cyn doesn’t go out)

**june zhang  
** i’m gonna have to pass. trying to get on my sleep hygiene shit.

you guys have fun though!

**gloria boone  
** I think I can swing it if we go at like 8 and leave by 11.

**mako gehringer  
** sounds gay, i’m in 

#    
  


This was how Mako ended up in the French Quarter on a summer Saturday with his best New Orleans friends, witnessing the beginnings of infidelity, watching the funhouse mirror version of himself twist and turn under the geologic pressure of a serious relationship. 

Mako and KC danced as they have done and will do many times before their tenure on this Earth is up. They ordered Sex on the Beaches and politely ogled the shirtless go-go dancers with quiet, disinterested curiosity more than anything else, KC and Gloria somewhat out of place due to their womanhood, yet treated as no less welcome by the bartenders and fellow patrons. They headed upstairs and to the balcony to look out over Bourbon Street and sweat in the late July heat and mugginess. They did what they did best: gossiped.

“Una used to take me here all the time,” Gloria announced, unprompted, as she leaned over the wrought iron railing with her drink held somewhat precariously in her hands.

KC’s expression became instantly piqued. “Ooh!” she cried. “I haven’t heard of Una Maloney in two, no,  _ three _ years.”

“That’s because three years ago I lowered the cone of silence so that Cyn wouldn’t leave me,” Gloria said with uncharacteristic melancholy. She raised her highball to her lips, then, before taking a drink, muttered, “She wouldn’t have left me, but, you know. We never know these things.”

Mako, who had only just arrived in New Orleans a little over a year before that night, stared between KC and Gloria with a mystified look on his face. “Who’s Una Maloney?” he asked in his somewhat inebriated candor, then added, remembering himself, “I mean, unless you want to keep me out of the cone, in which case I totally get it.”

KC looked at Gloria, who looked at her. An unspoken intelligence passed between them. KC turned to Mako and said, “Una Maloney is the communications director at the Louisiana SPCA-”

“Where I work,” Gloria put in. 

“And the one-time apple of little Glo’s eye.” KC tipped her drink in Mako’s direction. “The fall of 2014, Glo had it  _ bad _ for Miss Una, with her suede midi skirts and her platinum, bone straight hair and her  _ big ass nose _ and  _ big ass hands _ .”

“God, I was so embarrassing,” Gloria groaned. “A white woman! She was a white woman!”

“She sounds like the exact opposite of Cynthia,” Mako noted, thinking of Cynthia’s wildly curly, prematurely graying hair, her relative smallness of hand and largeness of waist, her taste for mom jeans and pretty much nothing else, her decidedly Polynesian racial background. He smirked a little. “You don’t have a type. Congratulations.”

“Oh, Glo has a type,” KC argued. “Cynthia’s just the exception to the rule.”

“That’s why I love her,” Gloria said somewhat dreamily, staring vaguely out in the direction of the drunken procession carousing down Bourbon without really seeing it. Mako thought of Jem for maybe the grillionth time in the past two months and took a long pull from his cocktail. 

“God, I remember this woman I used to date when I was like, twenty-one,” KC said, gazing into the carnelian ice at the bottom of her glass. “She was so fucking cool. She wore Jimi Hendrix T-shirts and no bra underneath so everyone could see her nipples always, and that never bothered me. I liked that about her.” She, who always finished her drinks first, suckled abortively at the trickle of fruitiness that was left of her Sex on the Beach and frowned a little. “Also, like, I’m definitely a penetration gal-”

“Amen,” Mako declared, raising his glass.

“But there was something about this woman that was just unlike anything else I’ve ever experienced.” KC looked at Mako sadly, and he wanted to put a hand on her face, to kiss her mouth with nothing but sympathy. “I love my husband and like, believe me - the dick too bomb - but I miss sleeping with women. I miss sleeping with  _ her _ .”

“What was her name?” Mako asked.

“Lilith.” KC emitted a somewhat hysterical laugh. “Can you believe that?  _ Lilith _ , mother of monsters, eater of babies.”

Mako blew a wry breath out of the side of his mouth and looked away. That’s when he caught sight of a burly blond at the other end of the balcony, cornering a dark-haired fellow and standing with a flirtatious bend to his spine. Mako felt his stomach turn to ice.

“Please tell me I’m not seeing what I’m seeing,” he said. KC and Gloria turned to look at the same time; only KC’s face became distorted with displeasure.

“Is that your boyfriend?” KC asked very loudly. It’s weird how Mako didn’t feel like he was actually in a relationship with Cassidy until that very moment.

The blond turned to look at them. His face fell as soon as his eyes found Mako. Something wordless happened - an understanding, a mutual animus perhaps - and then Mako was detouring back into the club and down the stairs and out to Bourbon and to Gloria’s Jeep Wrangler, and he knew KC and Gloria were following him without having to look behind him. KC’s hand touched his back as soon as his hand landed on the backseat door handle, and he was vomiting on the street, and it was okay. He was going home to sleep and cease to exist in his sleeping for eight going on fourteen hours.

Halfway through his second hour, his phone awoke him with a call from Cassidy, asking him to come open the gate for him. This was how they existed: after the sun, with Mako standing on the threshold between his domicile and the swirling dark of the rest of the city and Cassidy cradling his head in both of his hands and trying to kiss him, closemouthed and apologetic and gentle. 

“Go home,” Mako said with absolutely no heat, too tired to do this and wanting, more than anything, to babyshake the shit out of Cassidy until he left him alone or at least developed permanent brain damage.

“It wasn’t what it looked like,” Cassidy persisted, wired by alcohol and greeting Mako like a criminal in a line-up - armed with brass knuckles and a come-fuck-me mouth. He’d been alone and talking to some twink at the gayest gay bar in the city after he’d told Mako via text that he was spending the night in, and at that moment he was saying, “Let me come inside.”

Mako did in every sense. To this day, he cannot enter his bedroom without thinking somehow and some way of this night, and today on the bayou, he can feel the weight of Cassidy’s eyes and body as he always has. There aren’t very many people in his life who have done this to him: made him feel their eyes from inside his clothes and skin. His mother has done this. Aroha has done this. Jem has done this. Only with Cassidy has the feeling been utterly nauseating. 

They were at Mako’s place. After dinner, Mako offered Cassidy an orange and Cassidy took it without thinking. They slid into bed together and were complete idiots because lying there in the dark on their sides, they started talking like girls at a slumber party and didn’t stop for hours. Cassidy told Mako that Rosalee Hollings Villiers was a physiotherapist that could have easily given it all away for a career in modeling or, possibly, acting; was a baby blonde with a somewhat insectoid yet no less exquisite face - big eyes and a button nose and skin that bronzed in the summer and shone porcelain in the winter; was bossy and he liked that, yearned for that still even after having been continents away from her for years. Mako told Cassidy in turn about Aroha Ihimaera, who never put on weight despite her often voracious appetite and was about the thinnest pregnant woman he’d ever seen; who kissed iguanas and was the Steve Irwin to his Terri; who was his twin in the first of their days and only saw along with Mako the ways in which they mirrored each other in oh so invigorating fashion, but then time passed and they changed and somehow they woke up four years after they met and didn’t recognize the person on the other side of the bed anymore. Cassidy put Mako into a benign headlock and wrestled him into the center of the mattress beneath his heart-palpitating weight, where Mako stayed until very early the following morning, when he watched Cassidy sleep in the blue dark of the room before getting up after it was light and putting on Cassidy’s Henley for work and brushing his teeth and waiting for the moment when Cassidy would get up, pull the collar of his shirt down in the back, and kiss his nape. Mako pulled the collar back up and hugged himself in the shirt, a consummate schoolgirl. 

He had a Pavlovian response to Cassidy’s mouth and to nighttime. To Saturdays in July, August, and September, to Cassidy’s hand traveling down his flank at 10:32 PM. To his own sharp inhale at the immediate stretching sensation, to the heat flooding purplish to his face. To his breath hitching down into another octave, to Cassidy’s thighs meeting the backs of his. Sometimes he melted so hard at the sound of Cassidy’s voice, at the rhythm of his breath alone, that his stomach caved in and he doubled over, and for the next three hours there was nothing in the world but tongue; but the particular angle at which Cassidy slanted into him; but this almost religious destruction of self that came every day of the week that he and Cassidy saw each other; and the clearheadedness that immediately followed every apoplectic orgasm. He laid on Cassidy’s queen-size mattress and slowly became aware of the crazy, intense, kind of nasty shit he and Cassidy had said to each other in the throes of lovemaking, like, “Nobody’s ever felt this good to me,” which was true, and, “You deserve to feel so fucking good,” which was debatable, and, “Fuck me right there, I don’t want to walk tomorrow,” which was insane, and “I, I, I,” which was the prelude to something he’d never feel comfortable telling Cassidy with words. In the mornings, Mako drove through the pitch black Tremé and South Seventh Ward and the oaken Marigny under the quickly faltering watch of the jaundiced moon, arrived at home, put his fucked-out body in his bed, and waited until Kory came to throw herself on top of him demanding breakfast and kisses that reeked of the night he’d just come staggering weakly out of. 

Mercury passed back into retrograde. Mako fell out of bed again, this time nearly busting his head on the nightstand on his way down. He took Cassidy to catch a flick at the Burgundy Picture House, and because they hadn’t had a conversation that consisted of anything more than, “Fuck me,” “Are you okay?” and, “Have a good day,” for about a week at that point, while walking back home, they fought openly for the first time.

“I miss you,” Mako said. He’d forgotten it could hurt this bad, feeling this way about someone, like his heart was outside the protection of his ribs.

Instead of uttering something sweet or at least tepidly agreeable - his love for Mako existing purely in bed, in Red’s Chinese, and on the sofa when Mako rubbed the nape of his neck through generalized anxiety and migraine headaches - Cassidy just rolled his eyes and didn’t hold Mako’s hand. It was New Orleans. They used to kiss in front of non-gay bars in fucking Uptown of all places, and now it was this.

Mako widened his eyes at the schizophrenic sidewalk. “If you have something to say to me, by all means-”

“I am fresh out of things to say to you,” Cassidy declared with a certainty that only would have accompanied something he’d thought about for awhile. He didn’t do extemporaneity with any level of confidence, not like Mako, who could wax writerly and eloquent and stupid as fuck at the drop of a hat. Cassidy shook his head at the street. “I’m so tired of this.”

Mako’s gut sank sharply. “This what?”

“Talking!” As you recall, they used to talk for hours. “All you do is talk, nonstop, all the time! Don’t you ever just shut up?”

Mako’s eyes blew out wide again in his astonishment at Cassidy’s unmitigated gall. “Okay, never mind how offensive that is to me on every level imaginable - you’re telling me to  _ shut up? _ ”

“Please.” Cassidy quickened his pace. “Make my day and shut the fuck up.”

Mako stared at Cassidy’s back for thirty seconds, shocked into following instructions. He could stare at Cassidy’s back all night. Then, he said, chewing on every word like gum, “Here we go. You with your fucking boundaries.”

“Oh, so now they’re my  _ fucking _ boundaries-”

“You always do this,” Mako lied, instantly splitting, deep in his defense mechanisms and his manic rage that, like his mother’s, was sometimes whiplash-fast. “Every time I make a little headway, it’s just  _ pow! _ Shut out instantly, like you’re some kind of fucking fortress!” Speedwalking to match Cassidy’s pace, he grabbed Cassidy’s arm - which tried in vain to evade his grasp - and pulled the other man to face him. “You  _ never _ let me in, Cass!”

“Oh, I’ve  _ let you in _ , Mako,” Cassidy said, which was true, but at that moment, Mako wasn’t quite sure whether their prior oversharing was true vulnerability or just the accidentally-on-purpose prologue to hot sex - the temporary antidote to his back-breaking, years-long depression. “I got used to taking care of myself a long, long time ago, so I’m sorry you can’t live in my head or whatever the fuck you-”

“I don’t want to be in your head, Cass!” Mako cried a little frantically. “I want to be in your life.”

“You’re in my life!” Cassidy retorted. “Not that I ever asked you to be here!”

Mako was so appalled that he couldn’t do anything but gaze into the night sky. Cassidy watched him do this for a long moment, then announced, “I’m taking a walk.”

Mako got his bearings just as Cassidy was turning away. His hand flung out, grabbed Cassidy’s wrist, and gave it a vicious squeeze.

“No, no, no, no, no,” he spluttered, so fast it was all one word. “ _ I’m  _ taking a walk. You can stay here in your bloody ivory tower all by your damn self. Knock yourself out.” He turned to head in the direction of home, having claimed the last word - perhaps victorious in that way - and feeling really shitty about it. 

The truth was, he didn’t trust Cassidy. He’d maybe never trusted Cassidy - even when he’d told him all about his suicidality and his history of abuse and his ex-fiancée and yes, even Jem - but especially since the Oz incident, his fear for what Cassidy could do to him lingered like a bad aftertaste. He’d been held in those big hands and never once dreaded being crushed by them, but when he or Cassidy left each other’s homes in the morning, every morning, every red flag he’d ignored when they first met made his vision suddenly bloody. Mako went to bed. They never spoke of this night again.

They watched football on Monday nights. On 9/11, the Saints lost to the Vikings and Mako and Cassidy had a little too much to drink and laughed their way to bed, where they slept together without sleeping together for the first and only time, their arms around each other in a room that seemed awash in red and filled with fairies. The next morning they were hungover and bitched at each other over coffee and eggs. On September 18th, the whole family went to the Rum House to eat mediocre Jamaican food, and when Mum took Kory to the bathroom at halftime, Mako and Cassidy kissed in the medium multicolored light and ignored the dirty looks they were getting from the dudebros at the bar. Four days later, Mako cut Kory’s bangs, and then on the 25th, the Cowboys creamed the Cardinals twenty-eight to seventeen and Cassidy breathed hard on the sofa, shaking through the aftershocks of a panic attack that Mako soothed away with hands on his face and a Maya Angelou voice. The following Monday, three days before Mako’s thirty-first birthday, Mako looked at Cassidy opening a beer bottle with the butt of his Bic lighter and said, feeling his skin crawl off of him and into the night, “I love you.”

Cassidy looked at him with big blue eyes. “What?”

“I love you.” Mako could not force himself to make eye contact no matter how hard he tried, how hard he wanted to, so large was his mortification. “I’ve been thinking it for awhile, so I might as well say it.”

Cassidy said nothing for a few minutes. He watched the Chiefs make a field goal and sipped Miller High Life. Eventually, he slid his hand over Mako’s thigh and murmured, “I think I could love you, too,” and it was so embarrassing, so terrible, that Mako hid his face in his palm.

“Could?” he asked.

“I get scared of deciding I love someone.”

“So love is a thing that’s decided?”

Cassidy pulled off of the lip of his beer. “So I limit myself just in case I get clumsy and accidentally fall into something I can’t handle.”

Finally, Mako was able to look at Cassidy head-on and smile a little. “What does China have to say about that?”

Cassidy smiled as well. “Nothing good.”

And then he was kissing up Mako’s neck, pulling him into his lap. Mako put his arms around Cassidy’s neck and held the bowl of his cranium in his hands. They made love and it felt distinctly like a goodbye. 

After, Cassidy touched Mako’s naked hip and said, “You weren’t lying earlier, were you?” When Mako wordlessly shook his head, he followed his question with another - “Why?”

Mako’s brow rumpled. “Why what?”

“Why do you love me?” 

Of course he would ask this. Mako had thought along the same lines pretty much all his life.

Mako watched Cassidy, his face strangely vulnerable and utterly confused in the dark, before moving to crawl on top of him, thighs straddling hips, and look fully into his face.

“Because, sweet friend,” he said, soft. “You’re so big and so tender.” Cassidy dragged his thumb along the line of Mako’s jaw, pulled him in to touch their mouths together. Mako slid his lips to Cassidy’s chin, his furry jaws, and added in a murmur, “And I’m too old to be fucking around…”

“You’re thirty-one,” Cassidy noted.

“I know,” Mako said, putting his head down on Cassidy’s collarbone and closing his eyes, in which pinwheels of adoration and sadness spun. “I can’t fuck someone I don’t love anymore.”

Cassidy’s arms came up and closed around Mako’s body. They, like Mako and Aroha, were so alike and so different. Within a week exactly, Cassidy had flown out of Mako’s life seemingly forever, citing the articles, “I Can’t Do This,” “You’re Still in Love With Your Best Friend,” and, more than anything, “I Don’t Trust You Either.” Mako cried exactly once, making gnocchi with tomato sauce and Parmesan, and then FaceTimed with Jem in the morning’s wee hours and, the very next day, sat on the patio with Mum and Kory; eating fruit, crackers, and cheese with them; watching the birds fly overhead; and flirting idly with the butterflies that flitted around Mum’s garden.

Love, some love. Fading hickeys and finger-shaped bruises on his hips, Cassidy’s Henley in his laundry basket, and Kory playing the Lumosity games on his phone. He was incredibly, impossibly stupid, as he had been all his life in his unending, Tantalusian thirst. Today, on the last day of July, he is still a fool - but he knows more, knows better.

He steps into Wehunt with Kory on his heels. The shop is about fifteen minutes from closing, and Mako has timed this visit deliberately. With explicit instructions to Kory to look around and act oblivious (Kory, his love and his light, obliges him with a mock salute and drifts off in the direction of pink glass things), Mako finds his way to the checkout counter and, hovering his hand over the apparatus for a full ten seconds before actually touching it, rings the bell.

Within less than a minute, big and blond emerges from the back of the studio in a bright red apron. His face does something strange that is both happy and sad at the same time; in his deep Australian baritone, he utters an ambiguous, “How can I help you?”

Mako thinks abruptly of the fact that Cassidy has been servile for so much of his life, that the one time he was not servile, he was beating in heads for a living and trying harder than he ever had to end his own life. He does not know what to make of this. Twisting his mouth directly sideways and not at all up or down, he remarks, “That’s pretty aloof. Should I walk out and come back in and we can give this conversation another shot?”

Cassidy’s expression turns sheepish. “Sorry,” he says, putting his big hands on his edge of the counter. Explaining himself the way he only really became accustomed to doing in Mako’s presence and for his benefit: “I was uncomfortable so I just slipped into what was habitual and familiar.”

Mako does the lateral thing with his mouth again. “I make you uncomfortable?”

“At work when I wasn’t expecting you? Yeah.” Cassidy drums his thumbs against the formica, obviously still some level of nervous. He whirls his eyes around the shop. “So what’s up? Can I interest you in some… glass shit?”

Mako concedes a small smile that he starts to hide in his hand before thinking twice about it. “No, man… I wanted to talk to you.”

Cassidy’s face subtly but perceptibly falls. His gaze drops to the iPad currently being used as a cash register. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

Without being able to stop himself - this the hair trigger, bulletlike person he became and still is, to an extent, around Cassidy - Mako blurts, “So I see we’ve achieved nothing on the emotional constipation front in the past eight years.”

Meeting Mako blow for blow, Cassidy says, “I told you this. You’re the one that used to say people don’t change.”

“That’s not how I meant it and you know it,” Mako retorts.

“Do I?” Cassidy looks tired. Mako, on the other hand, is absolutely exhausted.

“Look, I didn’t come to argue with you.” Mako compulsively runs a hand through his hair and then waves that same hand dismissively in the air, suddenly in exactly the wrong kind of mood to be having this conversation in. “I just needed to tell you something.”

Cassidy finally looks back into Mako’s face. “Yeah?”

“Listen.” Mako mirrors Cassidy, putting his hands down on the counter and with them his foot. “I know that you’re going through it. I feel bad about that even though it’s so completely and utterly not my fault, and I will be firm on that point. I have nothing to do with the way your life is right now.”

“Okay, that’s fair, but it’s also totally fucking wrong,” Cassidy counters.

Mako makes his expression one of incredulity. “You’re the one who broke up with me when I was asking for you to stay and, I don’t know, work on things. Work on  _ us _ . Work on yourself.” Shaking his head and closing his eyes against the potential onslaught of contradictory information - him having rehearsed this conversation in his head seventeen times this week and not having adequately prepared for deviations from the script - he stammers out, “I-I-I’m not getting into this, it’s basically beside the point. You’re having a hard time, and that’s valid, but we broke up for a good reason even though I didn’t agree with it at the time. You were right, and we were wrong for each other, and I would ruin my life if you were in it again, and I can’t believe you would have the audacity to ask me to be in your life when I’m getting  _ married _ to the guy you broke up with me over, but that’s also kind of beside the point.”

Cassidy, who has been looking sadder and sadder the longer Mako has talked, makes an ambiguous noise in the back of his throat. “What is the point?”

Mako opens his eyes. “I hope you get everything you want in your life… but I can’t do this, I can’t. Not after what we went through.” Swiping a hand back and forth for emphasis: “I can’t be your person in the middle of the night or in your living room or in the bar a block from your house or in anything, ever. You chose to end things before, and I don’t blame you - what I’m saying is that I want things to stay like that.”

Cassidy finally appears as though he has crossed his despair event horizon. He must have known Mako was going to say this, even on this past Saturday when he held Mako on the bank of their sacred bayou and not once did Mako pull out of his embrace in an angry or insistent manner, but still he looks at Mako as if he has afforded him some awful, final betrayal - this looking so similar to the kind given to Mako by Aroha just a few months ago - and says, “So I fucked up for life, is that it?”

At that moment, Kory’s voice comes to Mako from across the shop. “Daddy?”

Mako blinks hard, raises his own voice. “Yes, my love?”

There is a soft clinking noise and the squeak and patter of sneakered footsteps against the waxed cement floor, and then Kory is at Mako’s side with a pleasantly absentminded look on her face, holding a glass crab the color of carnelian chalcedony. “Can you get me this?” she asks.

Mako and Cassidy look at each other - Mako somewhat crippled by his weariness, Cassidy clearly a little dazed by Kory’s hike in age since the last time he saw her and the corresponding changes in her appearance. Mako turns the crab over to inspect the price tag stickered to its underside; reaching into his pocket for his wallet and into his wallet for a ten-dollar bill, he says to Cassidy, “I don’t see it like that.”

Cassidy accepts Mako’s tenner and starts fingering the touchscreen cash register, hangdog as ever. With a look that once precipitated one of his most ferocious anxiety attacks, he hands Mako his change and pronounces, “One dollar and thirty-seven cents.”

Mako drops the money into the tip jar and braces a hand against the nape of Kory’s neck. Heading his daughter out of Wehunt, he stops only once to say back to Cassidy, “Good luck with everything.” He doesn’t say sorry. He’s not sure if he’d be lying or not if he did.

Heartbreak ends. Kory puts the crab up on her windowsill and names it Cassie. Mako doesn’t know if this is an intentional reference or what, but he says nothing. 

Heartbreak ends. Scrolling through Instagram for maybe the fourth time this year, Mako sees a picture of Aroha and Ilse in his feed and is abruptly reminded of the fact that he hasn’t yet unfollowed Aroha’s account. He fixes this summarily. 

Heartbreak ends. Gloria and Cynthia celebrate their fifteen-year anniversary with yeasty drinks and friends at their Algiers bungalow, locking the mean dog (a Water Spaniel/Australian Shepherd mix) in the bedroom and letting the nice dog (a Pit Bull) nose her face into Mako, Jem, KC, and Godfrey’s open and affectionate hands. 

Heartbreak begins again. Mako makes French toast for breakfast and finds Mum crying in her armchair in the living room, wheelchair folded up by her side, hands folded in prostration in her lap.

That night, Jem reads the actual, honest to God newspaper in bed while Mako thumbs through  _ Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights _ and pulls apart the fleshy, juicy, not quite sweet lobes of an orange. Halfway through the fruit, when he finds the page he left off on the previous evening, Mako reaches over to snatch Jem’s glasses off of his face and put them on his own despite the fact that they fuck with the contacts he already has in. Jem stares blindly at the paper in his lap for a beat before remarking, “Old man, you need to get your own glasses.”

“No, I don’t,” Mako says to be difficult. “I have yours.”

Jem scoots down the bed to lay his head against Mako’s shoulder. He closes his pretty much unseeing eyes and says, “Read to me, Mako.”

Mako peels a section off of his orange and gently shoves said section against Jem’s mouth. When Jem parts his lips and tongues at the citrus, he starts: “ _ ‘Tell me a story,’ Dunia often demanded in bed in the early days of their cohabitation. Ibn Rushd quickly discovered that in spite of her seeming youth she could be a demanding and opinionated individual, in bed and out of it. _ ” Pulling a face, Mako breaks off and speaks in his normal voice rather than his reading voice: “Now who does that sound like?”

“Nobody we know,” Jem utters with a wry snort.

Mako murmurs something sarcastic and unintelligible and munches on his orange. He reads aloud until he hears Jem’s telltale oinky snore, then puts his book down on the nightstand, throws Jem’s unfolded newspaper on the floor where he will surely slip on it when he gets up tomorrow morning, and urges his favorite zombie into something resembling a sleeping position at the far right edge of the mattress so that he can hog his favorite spot in the center of the bed. He and Jem haven’t done anything in this bed but kiss each other goodnight and sleep since grocery store Sunday a whole fortnight ago, and it is a testament to the very down-to-earth, humble, palindromic love they have that this is absolutely okay, that it is all Mako wants, that Jem will love him forever just the way he is for the rest of his life, long after their candle has burnt down to the wick and the glaciers have all melted and New Orleans has done its Ys thing once and for all.

In the first stage of sleep, many people experience something called a hypnic jerk: an involuntary twitch that occurs just as a person is beginning to slumber, sometimes sharp and sudden enough to cause their momentary awakening.

Jem begins to twitch just minutes after the final words Mako has pulled out of Salman Rushdie, and Mako knows he - shuddering, snoring - is in stage one sleep and well on his way to stages two and three. He doesn’t know why, but every time he feels Jem spasm beside him, he thinks he loves him more.

#    
  
  



	26. 26

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i feel weird about this chapter since it took me so long to write it and the time skips are very lackadaisical (for a good reason) and i VERY OBVIOUSLY was high some of the time writing it
> 
> i went back and edited all the previous chapters (just little grammar and dialogue stuff), so if you're nitpicky and you've been following this, maybe go back and read from the beginning :~)

#  _ 26 _

It’s August. The dog days of summer arrive with some fanfare, the kids of the Bywater playing like hooligans in the street with pop rocks in their mouths and sparklers in their hands. Where did they get such incendiary miscellany from? Did their mothers willingly provide them with the means to explode, or did their permission and funds come after some coercion? Arriving home from Tuesday ballet class, Kory stands alongside the Jetta and watches the children running in zigzag formations down Louisa, their mouths open to the sky and scarlet and green powder popping on their tongues like sweet pustules. Mako catches her staring - his pudgy, sweaty, sweet daughter who will in just a few minutes run upstairs and into a lukewarm shower before disappearing into her iMessages for the next two or three hours and then coming down to dinner with a somewhat faraway look on her face, sad, overburdened, stronger than she has any right to be - and he says, “Let’s go inside, love. It’s so hot out here I could crack an egg in the street and it would fry.”

Kory lingers for a moment. Mako can’t tell what she’s thinking, and this used to bother him a lot more than it does now - fifteen years of practiced non-telepathy with his offspring and romantic partners will teach a man how to accept and move on - but still, he yearns to peel back the layers of scalp, bone, and gray matter and reach into her thoughts with psychic fingers, to respond to such thoughts with something sympathetic or witty or just plain perfect. Before he can get mired too deeply in his angst, though, Kory is passing through the gate onto the patio before him and waiting for him to unlock the front door, looking at her smartphone as if it is the only thing worth anything in the world.

He wouldn’t dare make a crack about Zoomers and their devices, but he does indulge himself in a quick, teasing pinch on Kory’s bottom as she enters the house.

Mum asks Mako to make gumbo with the chicken parts and andouille that have been sitting in the freezer for the past three days. Mako stirs a dark roux and cuts up bell peppers, onions, and garlic with his wrist that hasn’t been bothering him - belatedly thankful for his accidentally on purpose ambidexterity after a childhood full of teachers that bitched at him to write with his right hand instead of his naturally dominant left. Jem comes in from class talking on his phone, so he doesn’t give Mako his afternoon hello and the accompanying kiss until they’re all sitting down at the table to dinner. They haven’t eaten a collective meal at the table for maybe two weeks today, and the formality of this - this cooperative sitting - hangs over the gathered household members like a physical, visible cloud.

“You ready for school to start next week, Kory?” Jem asks through the steam rising off of his gumbo bowl, his spoon halfway to his mouth.

Kory chews momentarily on the inside of her mouth. She swallows a mouthful of gumbo and refuses to look at anything but the table. “I don’t know.”

Mako knows that this is it. This is the beginning of Kory’s neurosis; of her mathematical, exponential disappearance into herself; of the sleepless nights of pure thinkingness and feelingness; of her shitty resemblance to her parents and their parents, to Mako in particular. He sees the next ten years in quadruple speed. He sees the involuntary hospitalizations and the possible episodes of self-harm; and her dangerous forays into this recklessly murderous, drug-addled city in which they live; and the dalliances with dysfunctional lovers, the parade of pimpled, dimpled, and wine dark faces in and out of his house; and the thick saliva drip when Kory will sob openmouthed into his shirt, shaking everywhere, hairline fractures in her flesh, bones, and psyche. Maybe he’s jumping the gun a little. Maybe this is just the natural hormonal toing and froing of middle adolescence. Maybe she's a teenage girl with a dying grandmother in her house. He says nothing either way, just watches the subtle play of emotion on Kory’s face and stirs rice, chicken, and andouille around in his bowl.

Jem, a long-time bastion of emotional sensitivity, erodes his expression into smoothness. Trying for helpful optimism, he notes, “You’ll get to see your friends again.”

“All my friends are in ballet anyway,” Kory mumbles around a spoonful of gumbo.

“What about Candela?” Mako asks, mentally gold starring himself for his ever observant parenthood.

“Candela isn’t my friend anymore,” Kory announces with a tragic matter-of-factness and not too much impatience, and Mako is forced to immediately reverse his preemptive self-congratulations and review his daughter’s entire summer in his head. There’s been ballet, yes. The playdates and sleepovers at friends’ houses in Mid-City and Uptown. Deniz’s birthday party, attended by ballet classmates and at least one boy, to Mako’s knowledge. Kory on her phone in the car, on the patio, on the sofa, in her room in bed at night. Mako recalls no overt falling out between his daughter and the girl he was pretty sure up until three seconds ago was one of her closest friends if not the closest one of them all, and he doesn’t know if it’s because he hasn’t been paying attention or if Kory is, horror of horrors, a smooth operator the likes of which he never before imagined. She’s never hid anything from him unless she thought it would get her in trouble. Klaxons sound in his head, but he keeps things casual. 

“Really?” he asks with deliberate tranquility. “What happened?”

Kory resembles herself again somewhat when she plays with her food for a long moment before speaking. As open as she is, she’s always carried within her a profound anxiety that has been the only definitive marker of her relation to Mako, save for her Rui and Molly Ngata plumpness and the dark chocolate mane growing wildly out of her head. When she starts talking, her voice is low and fast.

“She’s just been different ever since her mom got pregnant. It’s like the closer it gets to the baby coming, the worse she gets. And I know that she’s worried and she’s hurting and I’ve tried to be there for her, I’ve tried really hard, but it’s like, she’s really mean to me? And she turns around and calls it ‘not a big deal’ or says that she was kidding and she wasn’t serious but like, she’s always joking about stuff that she knows is really personal for me, like my weight or the fact that I’ve never been kissed or the things that I like that I know are dumb to everyone else but I really like them anyway because they’ve been my thing for like forever. And like last month her mom had a baby shower and Candela asked if I would come so she could have one sane thing to look at through the whole thing, and I told her I’d ask you but I never asked you because I didn’t know if I actually wanted to go after seven months of being her emotional punching bag, and I told her that like two days after she asked me to come and she cried really hard about it and told me we couldn’t be friends anymore, and now I’m just like, here or whatever.” Spiel over, Kory sticks a thick discus of peppery andouille into her mouth and chews on it, making soft mumbling noises around it. 

The thirteen year old part of Mako wants to ask why Kory didn’t say anything about this earlier, why she swaddled herself around her heartache like a humanoid baby blanket tucked tightly into herself, protective and hot and penitentiary. Being that the thirty-eight year old part of him knows that he will tease these reasons out of her eventually, though, he just reaches one bare foot across the underneath of the table to touch his toes to Kory’s and says, “That’s rough, kiddo. You did the right thing, though.”

“Did I?” Alien-eyed, Kory abruptly looks as though she might cry. “I feel like I was a really bad friend.”

“By refusing to put up with abuse?” Mako shakes his head with a marked sharpness of expression. “Bull. Candela was the bad friend in this scenario, and it’s not like you just kicked her to the curb either. You did good, Kory.”

Amidst the quiet slurping of gumbo out of the bowl of his spoon, Jem nods. “Your dad’s right.”

Though she’s said nothing since they sat down, Mum nods as well. For some reason, this makes Kory’s eyes even shinier than they already were; she lowers her head and makes a wordless sound of acknowledgment, then disappears once more into her gumbo, apparently having reached her max quotient for demonstrativeness for the hour. 

Silence broken only by the low cacophony of tableware clinking together and the occasional sound of eating falls over the table. Vaguely, Mako wants to ask Jem about his day. He wants to ignore the steadily ballooning feeling of wrongness that erupts within him, pushing against his eyeballs and his meninges, every time Mum is within eyeshot. His appetite has bottomed out and he is merely eating out of habit, because it’s dinnertime, because this is what families do. He plans to freeze the rest of the gumbo pot and eat out of it for the next three days, over and over until he doesn’t want to even think about gumbo again for at least four months.

Three and a half minutes into the silence, Mum clears her throat and puts her spoon down. “I wanted to talk to you all about something,” she says, and it’s unlike her to give her thoughts a preamble. Most of the time she just charges right ahead and says what’s on her mind. 

Mako closes his eyes and, because the onus is on him as Rui Ngata’s son and the first person on the lease to say it, asks, “What’s up, Mum?”

Crossing her fingers in her lap, bald, still big as a house but maybe at this point a condominium rather than the mansion she used to be, Mum sits back in her wheelchair and says, “I have my irradiation treatment/bone marrow transplant scheduled for the end of this month. I just want all of you to be prepared for the worst to happen.”

Jem looks at Mako, who refuses to look back. Kory, who is fifteen, to whom her grandmother’s healthcare has been talked about the very least and thus who knows only very little about what’s going on, looks up from her gumbo and asks, “What do you mean, ‘ _ the worst _ ’? Do you mean you’re going to die?”

Mum doesn’t spit out a quick affirmative like Mako expects and almost wants her to. Instead, she belabors the subject. “When someone is bombarded with radiation, it essentially destroys the body’s immune system, which leaves them vulnerable to infections in a way that those with healthy immune systems aren’t. When I receive this treatment, there’s a substantial chance that I might get very sick in the aftermath.”

“And die?” Kory asks, voice soaring into some panicked upper octave.

Mum opens her mouth and, like a fish, makes no sound. Mako drops his spoon against the side of his bowl and blurts out, “ _ Yes _ , and die.”

Kory, who was ready to cry a few minutes ago, takes very little prompting to actually soar into the territory of openly weeping. Looking between her father and her grandmother with overflowing pale pools for eyes, her voice is a damp stutter when she asks, “W-why would you do it? W-w-why would you do it i-if you might die?”

Mum, in her off-putting, newly soft way, rubs a nervous and wrinkled hand over her baldness and explains that, “The alternative is dying in a way that’s even slower and more painful. The alternative is giving up.”

“Not if it means you might live longer,” Mako interjects.

“I’m not having this argument with you again, Mako,” Mum shoots back with a quickness, and just like that, she’s Rui Ngata again. It makes Mako laugh; it makes Mako put his face in his hands and cry. Mum gazes up into the popcorn ceiling with a look of wistful contemplation and says, “It’s very rare that we get to choose the way we go out. Unnatural, even. I count myself lucky to be able to make this choice for myself. I’m perfectly sane. No gun to my head. It feels good.”

There is a stretch of time where the Great World Television turns the volume down to a firm and resounding  _ 1 _ ; and Mako is literally sitting there laughing and crying into his hand and ready to swear off eating gumbo for the rest of his existence on this pathetic Earth; and Jem looks kind of confused and perversely, wildly angry but also respectful, reticent, thoughtful; and Kory is crying just as her father is, glued onto her nana with googly eyes, ready to get her shit rocked. Mako is scared and confused as he has always, perpetually been for all of time. He doesn’t know what to say, but that rarely keeps him from saying anything. He puts all of his fingers down on the maplewood and pronounces, “Well I guess that’s that and we just have to respect it.”

Sort of automatically, Jem makes a face and blurts, “That’s really emotionally mature of you.”

“And I thought I’d never live to see it,” Mum coos proudly. 

Kory, with an abrupt grownness about her, scoffs at the top of her lungs. “That’s really mean, y’all.” She says, “y’all,” like she was born here, in the crater post-meteor.

Mako laughs. The tears dry on their own. Kory washes the dishes by herself, accompanied by Mum’s idly-talking, cobwebby, and wheelchair-bound presence, and all the while Mako stands in the doorway out of eyeshot and listens to what they’re talking about while Jem squeezes his biceps from behind. 

“I can invite her to the funeral for you,” Kory says when Mum starts talking about the Brazilian neighbor lady she hasn’t seen since she stopped gardening and taking all those biweekly pilgrimages to Home Depot for pesticide or some other such shit. “She lives in the yellow house, right? I can see if I catch her daughter coming out of the house in the morning.”

Mako goes to watch TV until the place where he is already numb and dead with grief is ever so slightly more numb and dead. In the morning, he drinks the overly bitter dark-roast shit Mum has begun to favor with renewed ferocity in the heel of her life while Mum talks in a strangely calm voice with Dr. Arulpragasam’s secretary on the phone, her thumbing her smartphone off when the call is over, sitting in the kitchen and looking lovingly at the fridge and every dumb photo, note, and knickknack magneted to its door.

The Saturday before Kory goes back to school, Mako takes her to Style House on Esplanade to get her hair, previously reaching her mid-back, cut to just above her jawline and straight across her forehead. Absurdly, Mum says when they are leaving the house that, “People are going to think she has cancer.” 

Mako gives her a crazy look and says, “Nobody is going to think she has cancer, what the whole fuck. She’s not hurting anyone by cutting her hair.”

On the car ride back home, sliding down St. Claude with Kory tittering nervously in his ear about how everyone is going to “hate” her for her haircut at school and her face looks so “fat,” Mako realizes that she might be hurting her nan by cutting her hair, hence the horrific comment, “People are going to think she has cancer.”

Ooh, how it stings. He orders Chinese-Southern fusion from Red’s around the corner because he knows that’s what Mum has secretly liked best in all the years they’ve lived on Louisa in Louisiana, having taken no vacations, having habited no other places. He hopes she interprets this act of food as an apology.

Kory experiences growing pains. The night before her first morning of school, as a sort of bleak omen about what her second year of high school would look like, she stands over Mako at 1:15 in the morning, poking him through his blanket, whisper-yelling, “Daddy!”

Mako wakes up immediately. He looks at Kory almost full of dread, his love at this moment so morbid. “What?” he asks without whispering, because how funny would it be if Jem woke up now of all times?

Kory is wearing an intense frown. “My thighs are hurting  _ so bad _ . My calves too, actually. Why are my legs hurting so bad? Am I going to die? Am I going to fall down and break and die li-?”

“Hey, stop it.” Mako is sitting up on the edge of his side of the bed by now, grabbing for Kory’s wrists and gently pulling on them. “You’re not dying, silly. It’s growing pains. I had growing pains.”

“Growing pains?”

“You’re actually kind of old to be having growing pains, but I guess they can happen at any time while your body is still developing.” Mako stands up and looks down at his porpoise daughter, her big-eyed pain and her novel shortness of hair. She’s, insanely, so much more beautiful than she ever had a right to be, and Mako feels justified when he wraps his long hairy arms around her and kisses the side of her head with unmitigated tenderness. “Do you want to go eat some cereal about it?”

Kory, who previously looked kind of like she was going to cry, sighs. “Yeah. We have Captain Crunch, right?”

Mako leads Kory out of the room and gives Jem a longing look on his way out. “If Jem got it the last time he went to Rouses, yeah.”

“Dope,” Kory says. She takes the stairs a little slow, but she makes it down in one piece. 

Mako and Kory rifle around in the kitchen. They find the Captain Crunch on top of the refrigerator and argue about whether they want to make two separate bowls or one huge bowl for both of them - Kory eventually emerging victorious and grabbing two yellow bowls out of the cabinet while her father gets the spoons. They sit on the sofa together, look at the window covered by blinds and filtering in Crescent City fluorescent streetlight, and Kory rubs her thigh purposefully and asks Mako, “How are cells stuck together?”

“What do you mean?” Mako asks, knowing whatever the hell is about to come out of her mouth is going to flabbergast him. 

“Like, we’re all one thing. I’m one thing, one object, one being. You’re the same way. And we’re made of organs, which are made of tissues, which are made of cells, which are made of even smaller things all the way down to atoms, which are themselves made of smaller things! And I’m just like, how are we all one thing even though we’re all made of different things? How whole is whole?”

Well, Mako can certainly say he’s flabbergasted, but not quite in the same way he’d been expecting he’d be. He strokes his beard thoughtfully and spoons peanut buttery cereal into his mouth. 

“To answer your first question, about how cells are stuck together, I have no idea. It probably has something to do with the way membranes work, man, I  _ guess _ . You’d probably do better asking Nana about that considering she’s a biologist.” When Kory nods thoughtfully, her face momentarily screwing up in pain, he keeps talking. “As for wholeness, I can’t really help you there either. How is it possible to be considered a whole thing and yet constantly, both biologically and in your head, feel separated? Like you’re in pieces?”

Kory frowns intensely for the second time tonight. “It’s too late to be talking about something like this.”

Mako finds he agrees with her and feels a sudden flush of shame. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

Kory just slurps milk out of her, frankly, huge spoon. Mako is embarrassed to notice that he’s actually thinking about what it will be like when Kory loses her virginity, or at least develops a prominent sexual bent to her personality, if she will ever lose it or develop one at all. He knows how much he changed in the wake of sexual riptides; what will Kory slip into? Neuroticism? Self-destruction? Hatred? He contemplates a Crunch Berry and feels nothing but sadness, nothing but the bone-breaking exhaustion that has been every moment of the past month.

Kory wiggles her toes at the unseeing Stevie and looks at Mako sideways and says, “Can I ask you for something?”

Mako munches and nods his head without looking at her.

“It’s probably the worst question to ask at approximately right now.”

Mako allows his eyes to touch her face finally. “I honestly don’t mind.”

Like she’s in a movie, Kory sighs before letting it rip. “Can you just, I don’t know, not die?” When Mako doesn’t say anything and his expression doesn’t change immediately, she’s talking more, saying, “Because I want to be big, and maybe I am big, but I feel small and childish almost all the time and I don’t think I’m ever gonna move out of that place and I need you all of the time, forever-”

“Baby…” Mako is putting their cereal bowls down on the floor and gathering Kory up into his arms, holding her hundred and forty pounds to his core, feeling like an idiot. Everything feels so stupid and it is so, utterly not. Because it’s the first thing that crosses his mind, because it is patently true, he says, “I need you forever, too.”

Kory snuggles into his chest and his neck, suddenly six years old - new to New Orleans, separation from her mother, heat, and absolutely everything. It has been established thus far that Kory is kind of a flamboyant crier in the vein of her father, ergo - she’s not crying, she’s just breathing into Mako’s skin.

Mako decides to be honest and to answer Kory in pieces. That’s generally what’s been working nowadays. 

“I can’t not die. Even if I wanted to not die - which, sorry, I’m really sorry, I don’t - I just can’t. That’s the way the world works.”

“I know,” Kory mumbles miserably.

“And please don’t think that you’re not going to change. Of course you are. Life is too long for you not to.”

“What if  _ I  _ died, though?” Kory asks into Mako’s neck. “Died before I could change, I mean.”

“Shush, oh my god,  _ shhh _ .” Mako breathes all of his air into her hair and clings to her with an almost mean desperation about it. He decides consciously to be fatherly. “You’re fifteen and a half years old, fish. You have literally so much time left to be a kid.”

Kory sits up, looking at him with a frenzied wideness to her eyes. “Dude, I’m ancient!” she cries, and Mako just barely resists the urge to not put his hand on her mouth so she stops making noises that very well may wake her grandmother. In the final stage of her life, Mako finds he is more terrified by his mother than he ever was as a kid, her current, calculated, calm cloak of death much scarier than her manic rage and her fury. 

Willing himself to be calm, Mako shakes his head. “You’re positively embryonic.” Putting Kory’s hand on his thigh and then his hand on her hand, he asks her, “Where is this all coming from? Why the sudden preoccupation with like, time and dying and growing up?”

“We’re starting college prep stuff first thing this year.” Kory isn’t looking at him, but there’s a shakiness to her voice that tells Mako she’s fighting tears. “And I just thought, okay, fine, in three years I’m going to be in college and like an actual adult. Where do I want to go to college? I haven’t even thought about that. There are so many things that everyone else is deciding that I just don’t want to think about at all. Deniz has already picked Loyola. Parisa wants to go to Juilliard. I want to play  _ Resident Evil 2 _ for the next three years and then wake up in some perfect college program in the perfect college for me, wherever that may be, with a bank account and like fifteen less pounds and the desire to finally be an adult.” She abruptly dunks her head down into her hands. “I don’t want to do any of this!”

Mako rubs circles into Kory’s back with his left hand. “Nobody does, kid,” he remarks. 

“And then, like, you know…” Kory murmurs in a much quieter tone. “Nana.”

Mako breathes hard. “Yeah.”

They sit there together for awhile, recalling songs, recalling video loop mindswings, recalling panic attacks, recalling really big full moons. Mako eventually progresses to leaning his head against Kory’s and watching a headlight beam pass slowly across the ceiling, bestowed upon them by the car crawling past the house at that moment, playing alternative rock/jazz fusion music, “ _ And we’ll wait for days like this to pass away, for the memories to fade… _ ” When he finds the strength to speak and the words to say, he asks his kid, “You wanna know a secret?”

Kory makes a sort of impolite grunting noise before raising her head and twisting around a little to look at Mako. “I like secrets,” she says. “Tell me.”

“I’m scared too.” Mako makes a sheepish face, saying sorry for failing her and everyone else in his fear, his overwhelming deficiency as an adult. “I’m still a big kid. Everything changes, and  _ you _ change too, but you also stay the same for the rest of your life. You always stay scared.”

“That’s so depressing,” Kory whines softly.

“I know, it really is,” Mako utters with a sigh. Kory leans their heads together again, them so goaty at this wee hour of the morning.

After a brief stretch of silence during which Kory ostensibly thinks hard, she mumbles, “I want to be alone.”

This breaks Mako’s heart a little - confuses him, too, it being so at odds with what Kory just stated - but somehow, he firmly, wholeheartedly agrees with the sentiment. “That’s cool,” he says. 

“But not all alone,” Kory amends, looking at him. “When I make it big doing whatever it is I happen to do, I’ll buy a huge house and you and Jem can live in it with me.”

Mako laughs, tickled, thinking about the likeness of Kory’s hypothetical future life to his current one. “Thank you, Kory. I’ll wait for that day. What’ll my bedroom look like?”

Kory’s face is contemplative for a moment, then she says, “It’ll be the sunniest room in the house so you won’t be so depressed all the time." She takes Mako on a tour of this whole made-up house, and Mako smiles, touched by the sweet little details she peppers in. Mako lies with Kory’s head on his stomach, her listening to the sounds of his abdominal body, him murmuring shit to her until she starts to doze and he knows it’s time to help her upstairs and into bed. He wonders again about her late adolescence and adulthood, about whether or not she will marry. Will she be gay? What will she do for a living? Will she stay sweet? Will she get sick? Will she, will she, will she…?

When he kisses her goodnight, his heart spills out into the sheets, jammy and purple. He’d try to clean it up but he knows the stain would never wash out.

Kora Mae Hinēkahu Gehringer Ihimaera, a Pisces and a fifth-generation Ngata girl, was born at 6:34 PM on March 2, 2010, a whole month premature, with immature lungs and an unhealthily dependent nature. Her name meant “a speck of daughter’s cape” or “a daughter’s fiery cape” in Māori, with some pretty English thrown in for good measure. In some ways, she still laid on the continuum between fish and man, still crawling painstakingly toward the borderline rather than standing inertly still. 

She had a difficult birth. She spent the first hellish, breathingest three weeks of her existence in the NICU on a ventilator, being watched hawkishly, covetously by her parents and neonatal nurses. Aroha wasn’t given the opportunity to do skin-to-skin with Kory right after birth (mostly because of Kory’s delicate state but also due to Aroha’s postpartum complications of her own, among them postnatal hemorrhaging), but Mako was able to do skin-to-skin with his only daughter for all of a minute before she was taken away by a woman named Courtney, who was going to hook her up to machines and make sure she lived to see her first month of life. As a result of Kory’s underdeveloped lungs at birth (as well as her prophetic star sign), Mako has always referred to the girl as  _ fish _ , his “fish baby.” He scrutinized his offspring in the NICU and wanted to say to every person that passed by, “Look at my baby girl! Look at her, I made her! I made her imperfectly, but I made her.”

Jem visited them in the hospital. Made buttery faces at Kory in the incubator and brought Mako cups of water and coffee from the cafeteria. Mako told him then that in the moments when he got to hold his daughter, he felt like he wanted so desperately to die, he didn’t want the moments to end, he didn’t like that time stretched on in both directions on either side of the moments - and Jem looked at him and nearly put a hand on his face in his overriding, overly gay concern for his friend/love of his life. He insisted on driving the new parents home and fixing them a Māori boil-up for dinner, after which he left looking disgruntled and Aroha went right to bed and Mako stayed awake until about four in the morning, exhausted and relieved and watching Kory in her lacy bassinet. 

Such a small creature, breathing with her brand new lungs.

Later, when she was seven, Kory would say that love is when you look at someone and your eyelashes go up and down and little stars come out of you. Mako would wonder if that was something she saw on TV and conclude that it didn’t matter.

The first three months of her life were similar to the past three months of Mako’s in their bone-creaking, eye-popping levels of enervation and anxiety. Kory’s newborn fussiness, her irregular sleep schedule, her frustration with not being able to to the things that would be ushered in by maturation such as eat, communicate, and move about of her own accord. The insecurity she came popping out of the womb with that was endemic to all New Zealanders, almost genetic, self-doubt the national emotion. Aroha casually complaining of wanting to smash Kory’s skull in every time she breastfed, begging and then rejoicing when they made the switch to formula. Jem telling Mako with affection that he looked awful, when is the last time he slept, to which Mako replied after a moment of thought, “Uh… two days ago.”

Jem bugged his eyes at him from his side of the sofa. “Is that physically possible? How are you not dead?”

Mako, who had since begun having microsleeps, bobbed his head a bit. “God only knows.”

That night, he and Aroha had their customary fight called Who Would Kory Resemble More? Fiddling with Kory’s hand by the bedside in her bassinet, Mako grumbled, “We already know her hair is going to look like me and my Mum’s hair. Look at it, look how dark it is already.”

“Okay, but her  _ eyes _ , bro,” Aroha commented from her side of the bed while she rubbed lemon and sage body butter on her arms, hands, and stomach. “They’re pale like mine.”

“That’s just because she's a newborn,” Mako argued. When a month and a half later, Kory’s eyes settled on Aroha’s brilliant gray-hazel hue after her umbilical stump had fallen off and Aroha had been through the first horrible round of postpartum ovulation pains and they smeared shit all over each other changing Kory’s diapers enough to last a lifetime and Aroha went back to work as she’d been sighing and dying to since she popped the pipsqueak out, Aroha made it her mission to taunt Mako endlessly to about it for a whole week. Mako, for his part, smoked cigarettes in the backyard and wondered why he felt like everyone, everyone but the baby, was gunning for him. 

Later, when Kory was ten, she said to Jem on the way home from the second ballet recital of her life, “I was on stage and I was scared. I looked at everyone watching me and saw you and Daddy smiling at me and waving. You guys were the only people doing that, and I loved y’all, and I suddenly wasn’t scared anymore.”

The paranoia built. Took on fantastic, eldritch proportions, spilling dark liquids at night, creeping into the house and into Mako’s lockbox mind. When Kory was three months old, he formally diagnosed himself with stage four brain cancer and found the condition contagious, having infected his newborn child. The overwhelming guilt and horror produced by this conviction being superlative, he became convinced that the only course of action was to end it all in the sweetest way before they or anyone else suffered anymore. It was a clean, easy choice in those days, in that time. Mako doesn’t even remember the exact date it happened now. 

At two o’clock one late May morning, sleepless for the past thirty hours, Mako wrapped Kory in her manta ray baby blanket and carried her out to her big ass car seat, kissing her, trying not to make too much noise. He planned to drive thirty minutes south to Cook Strait and walk them straight into the Tasman. He had a tank full of gas and a rare clarity to make use of it. If Aroha hadn’t awoken for midnight munchies and tumbled into the kitchen and found through the French doors her fiancé - the father of her child, her puzzle piece fast dwindling in her favor, screaming and cursing and crying because dammit, the car wouldn't start - his plan to murder-suicide likely would have succeeded.

Aroha, a mother and a girlfriend all of a sudden, ran Kory into the house and tried in vain to reason with Mako, all while a chorus of confused and alarmed neighbors began to turn their living room lights on and ask loudly, "What in God's creation is going on?!" She called Jem on Mako’s cellphone (who she and no one else knew the pin code to for reasons Mako didn’t like to contemplate at the time), who told her in no uncertain terms to call emergency and that he’d be at the Porirua house in approximately ten minutes. 

By the time Jem arrived, twelve minutes later, the neighborhood was alight with yellow, orange, red, and blue - the chosen colors of the ambulance and police car strobes. Calm and urgent EMTs pleaded with Mako through cracked shotgun windows, and Jem kind of easily pawed his way though them, murmuring, “I’m his emergency person, his first in case of an emergency person, yeah, that.” Slipping into Mako’s passenger-side seat, he talked to his crying friend for twenty minutes.

“What’s wrong, Mako?” he asked, so casually and so seriously at once.

“We’re all going to fucking die!” Mako cried into the steering wheel.

“Yeah?” Jem asked, smiling gently. “And what’s the insane part of that that landed us in this situation?”

And Mako told him. And Jem talked to him.

“You know, there’s always the chance that you’ll turn out okay in the end.” Jem scratched idly at the back of his neck, then reached out to touch the back of Mako’s with the same curling fingers. “You might want to get checked out just in case.” This sound, loving reason is what convinced Mako to climb into the belly of an ambulance with Jem at his side, his first in case of emergency person, his everlasting friend. Mako was taken to the Wellington Regional Hospital emergency room, where he was gently sedated and from whom a history was carefully pieced together by Jem and Rui, who was contacted by Aroha before Mako even left the house. 

He was placed at the Te Whare o Matairangi Mental Health Recovery Unit at Wellington Regional. He thought, in retrospect, how funny was it that his family general store was called  _ Te Whare _ as this psych unit was called  _ Te Whare _ , how funny was it that his Raukokore school was a  _ whare _ as this place was a  _ whare _ . He was promptly - with a sort of hilarious finality by the very young, very spunky, very female Dr. House - pronounced, “Bipolar I, with very,  _ very _ likely side of autism spectrum. You’re like, very Aspie. Very Aspie indeed.”

Mako remembers this with the utmost clarity. It slices into his brain like a sativa high and vanishes into his definitions and his drawers where he keeps everything he knows. 

He was visited in the hospital. Jem showed up every visitation without fail, sometimes with Kory strapped to his hip, sometimes not (when Aroha was feeling motherly and claimed her as her sole thing, her only one). Mum came to visit in the morning on a Wednesday, suddenly full of understanding for him and the way he was, the way she’d claimed he wasn’t in all the years prior. Aroha never came. She talked to him on the phone a lot, though - “Congratulations on the formal diagnosis, man,” she said. “I got mine when I was like nineteen; I was wondering when you were going to catch up.”

“Gee, thanks,” Mako said sort of genuinely, relieved of group therapy for the moment due to Aroha’s good timing of calling him just before 2:00. “I really appreciate it.”

“You’re so sarcastic,” Aroha sneered.

“Only ‘cause you think I am,” Mako sneered right back. Broken irreparably they were at that instant and forevermore.

He was inspected for his tattoos and birthmarks, which were jotted down and hastily drawn onto a printed outline of a man by a nurse named Ava. Every piece of metal or plastic that could be easily removed from him (i.e., his plugs and his nipple piercing) was put in a plastic bag and stored at the nurses’ station. All of his clothes were taken away and replaced with paper scrubs the color of Kory’s bluest blue blanket, until later, when Jem drove over three t-shirts, a sweater, two pairs of sweatpants, three pairs of underwear, and three pairs of socks so he didn’t have to wear the crazy person mental hospital socks with the plasticized bits of white on the soles anymore. For two weeks, to be seen as “well-behaved” and “taking to his treatment” by the nursing staff (but also to be gloriously, euphorically alone), Mako bathed in a gray shower stall with a cardboard washcloth and, after Jem brought it for him his second visitation, Irish Spring soap. He dried off with a cardboard towel. He put his crazy person mental hospital socks on and told Ava he was done in the shower. He went and sat in the day room, frozen for the next thirty minutes and wondering all the while when the pre-bedtime snack would be and where, fucking where, was Kora Mae. His roommate yelled at someone for the sixth time in as many hours, and for all of the patients on the unit, this was the breaking point of their lives, the event horizon of forever. For the nursing staff, the counselors, the social workers, and the doctors, though, it was Tuesday. 

His roommate liked to find him in the day room and plop down on the sofa in the corner where he inevitably and invariably sat. He called their couch “the throne for two” and liked to smoothly disparage anybody else who sat on it without his express permission - anybody but Mako, who was privileged with the couch due to the good luck of having been roomed with this guy. This Dean Waipukakingi. This smiling con-artist with a coffin tattooed to his neck, the word  _ DEAD  _ inked in red beneath his right eye. This antisocial/borderline personality who would talk to Mako when they laid in their room with the light on just before bedtime and Mako flipped through a book Jem had brought to him from home - the fucking Evanovich stolen from his mother, always there in the most quintessential moments in his life.

“Where’re you from, eh?” Dean asked him, fingering the gothic coffin tattooed on the left side of his neck. Mako wondered not for the first time how easy it was for Dean to be a successful con-artist with such conspicuous, outrageous tattoos. 

“Here.” Mako tried to read the same sentence for the thirty-second time in like eight minutes, then decided to give up and stare at the fluorescent room light above. He felt so fucked up from the Trazodone they gave him for sleep and he couldn’t breathe being so far away from Kory, his one and only so much more than Aroha’s. Thinking about his answer the moment after he uttered it, he amended it - “I was born here, raised between here and the Bay of Plenty.”

“Ooh, so you’re like half-city, half-country boy.” Dean earnestly, genuinely purred. “That’s hot.”

Mako idly entertained the thought of getting in so much trouble with the hospital, Aroha, his mother, and Jem and fooling around with Dean Waipukakingi after lights out and between checks. He knew that Dean was full of shit, though, that Dean took pleasure in fucking with people and being the center of attention to the exclusion of all else, so he just closed his book, put it on the wooden nightstand, and laid down in the pajamas he’d been wearing all day long, saying, “If you say so.” He knew that Matilda or Ava would be around in a few minutes to ask if he or Dean wanted to take a shower; he knew Dean would say no as he’d said no yesterday; he knew he would say yes just to be alone for more than two seconds; he knew this as he’d come to know everything in the psych unit, as if it had been inscribed on the back of his hand for his whole life and he’d only neglected to see it until just now.

In the shower, he experienced the best part of hospitalization, save visitation. During visitation, he had the conversations with Jem and his mother that he could never have had before in his supposed normalcy, his poorly concealed mental illness and neuroatypicality. During visitation, Jem held the back of his head while he tried to cry as quietly as he could, and then five minutes later they’d be laughing obnoxiously about the doodles that Tatum, Loren, Quick, and Blaise had sent over in a get well card. During visitation, he’d hold his little mermaid in his arms and tell her that he loved her so bad, that he was going to get better just for her, and she, having missed him so much, would just nuzzle into his chest sometimes, cry sometimes, make sweet noises sometimes. In the shower, though, he could stare into the floor drain and sigh very deeply and allow the water to hit him as long as it took for him to become one with it and slip noisily into that floor drain he’d been contemplating so seriously. In the shower, he was not so gently/harshly surveilled by every prescribed authority figure and every fun, awful, sick person he shared this unit with. In the shower, he could bite his lip hard enough to draw blood and cry into the tile and wonder why, fucking why his life was changing as it was. He thought for a moment what life would have been like if he’d married Aroha before the kid had been born and done something with his time post-university other than snort coke and write unmarketable bullshit. Keurig cups came to mind, followed by Calvin Kleins, Egyptian cotton sheets, a credit card with a $9000 credit limit, and a house payment - not this. 

The men and women on the unit were colorful. Mako can’t quite bring himself to call himself as saturated as the rest of the patients were, and we all know what he’s like. At six o’clock in the morning, before the sun had even breached the horizon, they were all shuffled out of their bedrooms and into the dining/day room on the unit, unwashed and sleep-deprived from the night before when Dean walked up and down the hallway alternately flirting with and verbally harassing the night shift nurses at the top of his lungs. Right off the bat, Dean was on the coffee decanter and Jade, his best friend on the unit and a child care specialist with a bipolar diagnosis, was trying to turn the TV from the news to The Edge.

“What did I tell you about the remote, Jade?” Ivy the nurse would say every morning.

“Nobody wants to watch the flippin’ news,” Jade would reply with her tongue stuck out of her mouth between every word. She had tried to kill herself by putting her head in her mother’s oven a week ago, but by now she was pretty cheery.

“Put it on Al Jazeera,” Adam Friend the OCD Wonder would say when he walked in at that moment exactly.

“How many times do we have to tell you guys that in the morning, the TV is not a democracy?” Ivy, holding a clipboard, would find the ceiling with her eyes. “We are the autocrats and you will do what we say or else suffer the penalty.”

Mako internally reflected on how depressingly true this was. “Maybe you should make a sign,” is what he said out loud.

Ivy smiled brilliantly at him. “That’s actually a really good idea,” she said, and then started scribbling something on her clipboard, which Mako supposed was a good thing for him.

Then it was the second string patients, the ones who got up after the first string patients. Casper Deadman, a schizophrenic car salesman who blinked sort of weirdly into the middle distance and scratched his head vigorously every now and then, but otherwise seemed pretty normal, if a little taciturn. Zoë Bell-Schlagenhauf, a sort of chubby obsessive-compulsive-depressive-repressive who liked to look at Mako, ask him about the meaning of each of his tattoos, and talk about the summer when she had chlamydia. Jesse “Jessi” Jensen, who looked like a Holocaust Jew and refused to actually eat breakfast, only sort of drank her coffee and sort of chewed on her fingernails and finally, after arguing with Ivy for like thirty years, conceded to eat a jello cup out of the padlocked refrigerator. The man whose name Mako shamefully cannot recall, an old Māori with fuzzy gray hair who ambled everywhere with abject slowness and smelled always fecal despite the best efforts of the nurses. 

Mako sat next to the nameless Māori guy and watched Dean put his hand on the smallish swell of Jade’s ass where neither Ivy or Ava was looking, forcing his shitty buttered toast and his shitty eggs and his acceptable Splenda’d Cheerios into his mouth. Jessi flicked her lank bangs out of her angular face and Zoë asked him if he was married, him having no rings but an infant child that visited him almost every day. Adam inhaled breakfast and then went to sit in front of the television and absorb the news. Casper ate his and Jessi’s eggs, then left the room to go back to his bedroom until the morning’s first group therapy session would start.

Then there was the last string, which consisted entirely of one Kiwa Eketone, a seemingly genderless teenager who’d tried to hang themself in their closet the same night Mako planned to walk himself and his child into the deepest water in a thirty-mile radius. Kiwa stumbled into breakfast after it had already gone cold, picked at their food for two minutes before dumping it away, and covered their face with their wavy mop of hair, sitting down next to Mako at the dining table, hiding from everyone. Everyone, even the staff, struggled with pronouns where this teenager was concerned - avoided their dark eyes, jotted down their near-speechlessness - and Mako more than anyone else wondered what happened to Kiwa Eketone after they left Te Whare. Did their psychotic depression ever abate? Did they graduate from high school and go on to some psychology degree at Victoria U like they probably wanted to? Were they still a thousand-yard starer of the sweetest inclination, still an Aquarian the likes of which Mako had recently become? Did they cut their hair away from their quite pretty face, which Mako was given the privilege of seeing one 6:30 smoke break when Kiwa looked up at him and said, “You’re welcome.”

Dean whistled lowly. “That’s a girl,” he declared around the butt of his cigarette, nudging Mako, who he had something of a friendly fascination for. “You owe me a tenner after we get out of this bitch.”

“I wasn't participating in that bet, mate,” Mako said, feeling an immediate surge of misplaced guilt when Kiwa’s hurt registered behind their bangs. He flicked his first cigarette into the ashcan and lit the second one that Kiwa had procured specifically for him with Dean’s cherry. “That was you and Jade and Adam. I was just coincidentally present.”

“Pretend like you’re smoking,” Dean said in a not very quiet undertone, passing off his cigarette to Kiwa when Archie, their second-favorite social worker, passed by their triad with the perpetual clipboard. Kiwa raised the cigarette to their lips and forgot not to actually inhale, then broke down in hacking coughs that Mako, feeling some strange mix of paternal/fraternal/affectionate, vigorously rubbed their back through. He thought Kiwa was a boy by the way they coughed, but their precious sad eyes said otherwise.

He’d never talk to these people in his normal life, Mako realized about three days in. There would never be any reason for him to talk to Jade Muir the aspiring infertile mommy about her prevailing philosophies about life (namely, that “love [was] a lie”) and the petty drama that occupied her weeks, her sister named Willow who used crystals like Robbie and had three kids and never passed gas in her husband the systems architect’s $555,000 house. He’d never have to bear witness to the super obnoxious shenanigans of Dean Waipukakingi, him stealing the boiled eggs out of everyone’s salads during lunch and getting into it with nurses who said, “You’ll be in here forever, Dean, you keep it up.” He’d never have been the receptacle for so many horrible, mundane traumas, for Zoë Bell-Schlagenhauf’s rape at the age of sixteen, it was her best friend, he got her way too drunk; for Adam Friend’s fiancée who left him two weeks ago after she’d decided he’d had enough of his obsessions and compulsions, his podcasts, his light-checking, his middle-of-the-night creepings into the kitchen and onto the back patio. He’d never have sat in front of Māori Television with a kid six years younger than him, talking about his child.

“She was born like a month premature,” he said to Kiwa because for some reason the teen was interested in this. “It’s weird thinking about how old she actually is when you take into account the time she spent in the womb. It’s weird thinking about her maturation in those terms, how she’s behind in some ways and ahead in a whole lot of other ways.”

Kiwa didn’t look at  _ Get Your Fish On _ where it played on TV; instead, they elaborated and elucidated in their seat next to Mako in the day room, talking with their hands the way all people Mako remembered talked. “I actually really like stuff like that,” they said with a not-smile playing on their face. “Babies maturing and stuff. How kids change when they grow up. I think I want to take care of kids, you know? After I graduate, if that ever happens.”

Mako made a soft, somewhat loving face at Kiwa and thought incessantly of his little one. “Of course you’ll graduate. You’re really smart.”

Kiwa shook their seasick wavy head. “Not really. I’m not that good at school.”

They reminded Mako so much of himself when he was their age. “That doesn’t mean anything,” Mako said sincerely. Kiwa just looked at the TV, and Zoë walked into the room to start asking Mako when he started stretching his ears and how much did it hurt. Mako just talked to her, because it was the only thing he had to do in the late afternoon besides watch TV, bother a nurse, and sleep.

That night, Mako barricaded himself in the bathroom amongst the beseeching of nurses and the one social worker that stayed kind of late (Amanda, Mako remembered her name was, because she had big hair and talked with her manicured hands). He sobbed for his daughter, hollering that he wouldn’t come out until she was there waiting for him, standing on immature legs and toddling into his arms. Eventually they got him to come out and plied him with two milligrams of lorazepam, and he slept soundly with the Evanovich beneath his pillow, and the next day when Dr. House came she said to him over the click-clacking of her keyboard, “Maybe we’ll try you on Seroquel.” The following day, he proceeded to zombie walk through group exercise therapy, zombie talk through rec therapy, zombie eat at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, wired with manic energy and dulled until matte by medication.

The nameless Māori guy - for some reason Mako wanted to call him “Albert,” knowing that wasn’t his name - ate in slow motion as well, airlifting peas into his chapped and foamy mouth, farting and then soiling himself. Then everyone at the table was coughing and gagging, then dinner was summarily over, then Mako was saying to the night nurse when she gave him his nighttime meds, “I don’t think I can take Seroquel anymore.”

“Talk to Dr. House when she comes back on Wednesday,” Frankie replied, watching him hawkishly as he swallowed three pills and then making him say, “Aahh” at her so she could see that he took them all correctly. 

Dean left the day Mako was put on Risperdal. It was May 27, his twenty-fourth birthday, so Ava brought chips and popcorn for an afternoon snack and Jade pulled him aside to kiss the side of his face when she thought none of the nurses were looking. Mako had learned over the course of the last week and a half that Dean had been placed in Te Whare as a condition of a court sentence, something having to do with vandalizing a jewelry store or his ex-girlfriend, a jeweler's, house. Before stepping off of the unit for good, Dean gazed upon Mako as he stood in the hallway - looking at the clock in the nurses’ station and waiting as he always waited for something new to happen, for visitation or dinner or snack or just the right time to take a nap - and Dean, the gazer, the watcher of all things, smirked at him and said, “On my way to the halfway house, eh?”

Mako wondered again why Dean liked to talk to him so much. “You’ll finally get to eat your Neapolitan ice cream,” he said.

“Ahh, only if they let me do the grocery shopping,” Dean replied with a laugh, scratching his grown-out buzzcut, smirking at Mako.

“They take you on little outings,” Mako said with absolutely no authority, just guessing from things Aroha had told him and things he’d seen in movies about drug addicts and mental patients. “You can ask them to take you to an ice cream parlor.”

“You know you have good ideas sometimes,” Dean remarked fondly. He looked at Mako then with so much tenderness, like he’d genuinely miss him or something, and Mako thought of how awful everyone on the unit was, awful just because they needed so much help, and he wasn’t sure if this place - if any place - could truly give it to them. He tried to get it there. He’s been trying to get it in New Orleans. He doesn’t know where to find his help, his peace. Dean Waipukakingi gave him a grin and asked him, “Where you at out in Wellington?”

“I’m in Porirua now, mate,” Mako said, leaning back against the wall next to the nurses’ station, where Miss Tonya would come around in a second and fuss at him to, “Go hang out in your room or in the day room.” He shrugged a little, feeling a bit sorry. “Wellington’s out for this twenty-three year old parent. From now on it’s the ‘burbs or bust.”

“ _ Shoo! _ ” Dean shook his head. “Guess this is it, then, isn’t it? You gonna cry, faggot?”

Mako mirrored Dean’s eternal smirk. “Only if you do first.” He knew how to flirt with men just as well as he flirted with women. Dean laughed and Ivy called to him from inside the nurses’ station to retrieve his piercings and personal effects before his departure. Here came Miss Tonya, shooing Mako out of the way, and then Mako would wonder as he wondered about Kiwa for the next fifteen years whatever happened to Dean after he left Te Whare. 

He waited and he longed to go home, to his daughter and his fiancée and his Teasippers and the homemade pizza Jem said he was going to take a stab at making for him when he got out of the loony bin. He waited for minutes upon hours in his bedroom beneath paper sheets, in the gray hallways where the nurses told patients not to linger, in the day room in front of the normal parade on television, smoking outside with Kiwa, who he reluctantly taught how to inhale and exhale. He waited when he took his morning piss and scraped his soft toothbrush bristles against his teeth, waited when not really faking to Dr. House his renewed sense of mental health and psychological wellbeing in her sterile taupe office, waited in line to take his Risperdal and his Eskalith and his Trazodone for sleepytime sleepiness, waited in bed, staring at the ceiling and the wall until everything slid gray-brown together and the  _ zzz _ s were on his eyes finally. He thought about a lot of things while he waited. Was he feeling better, less suicidal, because of his new medicine, or was it out of an unshakeable desire to be free from the shackles of hospitaldom? Would he go back to the psychotic kamikaze pilot in him as soon as he left Te Whare? He picked at the white plasticized shit on the soles of his socks and ached for Kory’s little face. He worried about her wellbeing under Aroha’s breastfeeding, eye-rolling, hard-sleeping watch in his absence. 

Finally, it was Friday and he was leaving. He woke at 6:00 AM on the dot, because the hospital goings on that hadn’t been his when he came here simply refused to be his routine until all of a sudden, they were. He ate breakfast, did morning exercise therapy with Archie, teased Kiwa about their slouching form, and watched half an episode of  _ Coronation Street _ before Ava came into the day room and said, “Mako? It’s time. Your people are here.”

_ My people _ , Mako thought with glowing, injurious pride. He told Kiwa goodbye - not acting fatherly in any way - and then passed into the nurses’ station to get back his plugs and his nip’s favorite barbell. Ava, who he’d become overly acquainted with in the two weeks he’d spent on the unit, smiled and blushed luminously at the barbell when he told her what part of his body it went in. “Why in the world would you want to put it there?”

Honestly, Mako answered, “It’s really great during sex.”

Ava made a face that said  _ touché _ . “They always are,” she said.

Jem, Tatum, and his little girl waited for him outside in the brilliant, shining great beyond - them his real family, Aroha and his mother nowhere to be seen. In their presence and in the sudden vibrant Technicolor outside - so different from the bland mints and grays and beiges of Te Whare - Mako felt the kind of bated power he did on the night of his attempted murder-suicide, the clarity to see his capabilities and his potential just out of reach as if beyond some great windowpane. He held a giggling-crying Kory in his arms, looked unshaved at Jem and Tatum, and said, “I feel insane.”

“Wasn’t the point of this whole exercise to get  _ not _ insane?” Tatum asked, leading him to Jem’s car - no longer the Rabbit of years long past, this time an Audi Quattro from the late 80s.

“No, I mean, everything is so colorful and beautiful and crisp.” Mako took several moments to stand outside of the car, looking at the overwhelming spread of his surroundings with a sort of childish awe - the trees, the avian clouds, the cerulean sky. “I feel like I just spent the last two weeks being dulled by monotonous colors and routine and cable television. Is  _ that  _ mental health?”

“I’ll show you mental health,” Tatum said without missing a beat, then kissed him fully on the mouth and ran her fingers through his longish hair. She hugged him, hugging Kory at the same time, and said, “Welcome home, baby Mako.”

It took two more years for the realization that had begun to set in at Te Whare to truly, finally take root in him. The tardy recognition about Aroha and everything she was and wasn’t, and what he was meant to do as Kory’s daddy, her protector, her one and only. Two more years for Mako to rent a truck and move all of his and Kory’s junk in boxes into its stomach with the help of Jem and Tatum, who were there for him always, who loved him more than anyone deserved to be loved. He lived with Jem in the two-bedroom flat on Byron Street, and the three of them trundled off to Mako and Jem’s camera shop in the mornings and trundled back home in the early evenings, eating Mako’s boil-ups and lamb chops for dinner, sometimes ordering takeaway, watching the late night children’s programming on television before bed. Romantic tension tangible enough to cleave with a knife bubbled between Mako and Jem as they slept on the same mattress at night and ate WeetBix with fruit out of the same bowl in the morning; there existed an awareness between them that Mako was no longer bound to Aroha anymore, bound to a heteronormative heterosexual standardized normie  _ anything _ for that matter, so what was keeping him away from Jem?

Later, when Kory was twelve, she’d say that, “When you say my name, it sounds different in your mouth than it sounds in other people’s. You do the same thing with Jem.”

Mako would smile at her a little and remark, “That’s because I love you guys so much.”

Back in 2012, on Jem’s sofa in the house on Byron Street in Wellington, New Zealand. Jem looked at Mako while they hung out after putting Kory to bed, looked at him with a face full of mirth and mourning and said, “Hey, Mako.”

Mako, who in his young parenthood had old-person aches in his mid-twenties back, shoulders, and feet - old-person biases, old-person strawman opinions about television programming and fashion and sexual maturity - looked back at Jem with a sort of quietly tired look on his face and said, “Hey, Jem.”

Jem paused for a moment, then got his nerve up. “What are we doing?” he asked, the evenness of his tone belying the gravitas of the question. They watched each other, daring each other to move, before finally Jem gave in again and took Mako’s hand where it sat between them on the sofa cushion. He twined their fingers together, and Mako, loving him so, let him.

“Do you know what I’m going to say?” Jem asked.

“I think I do.” Mako swallowed, looked at Jem’s face with eyes that had gotten so tired in the past two years. “Please say it anyway, in case I’m an idiot.”

“I love you,” came flying out of Jem’s mouth at Mach 10.

Mako winced; he wasn’t expecting Jem to go that far at that moment, but he wasn’t really surprised considering everything.

“Wow, that came out.” Jem blinked almost as if he was confused, deeply yellow in his embarrassment. “I’m sorry-”

Mako clamped down on Jem’s fingers where they were trying to retreat from his. “Why are you sorry when you’re so obvious?” he asked, smiling a little bit. “I know you love me, and I don’t think I should have to say it, but I’ve known it for years.”

Jem shook his head. “It’s not like that,” he said.

“I know,” Mako replied.

“I mean, of course it’s like that, but it’s also-”

“I know.”

“Can you let me talk?” Jem looked at him so fully then, and it was almost as if he was looking at him for the first time in their lives. “I’m in love with you.”

They sat in silence for a while, looking at each other’s faces, their eyes, their crazy sleepy Jewish person hair; looking around the room that had suddenly changed, the bookshelf and the floor lamp no longer the same in the wake of Jem’s verbal revelation. Eventually, Jem sighed and asked, “Are you going to say anything?”

Mako couldn’t help the smile that tried to play on his mouth. “I thought you wanted to let me talk.”

“I think I’m done,” Jem admitted.

“Okay.” Mako nodded, fixing Jem with his obsidian eyes. “I love you, too. I’m probably in love with you, too.”

Jem, somehow, looked both miserable and amused. “Probably?” he asked.

“I don’t know, Jem, I’m having a quarter-life crisis and I just broke up with the mother of my child.” The possibilities then were so bleak, regarding absolutely everything. “I don’t know what the fuck I feel.”

The misery increased in Jem’s expression, coupling with apology and regret so palpable it stung Mako. “Shit, I’m so fucking sorry-”

“Stop, don’t be-”

“No, I have the absolute, worst fucking timing-”

Mako sighed and closed his eyes and pleaded, “Kiss me, please.”

Again, they gazed at each other with so many non-words passing between them. When Jem leaned over to touch their lips together, Mako felt as though he was going to vomit all of his internal organs into his best friend’s face, lovely and gross. They kissed once - a long, lingering, painful thing - and then Mako was bringing his hand up to touch Jem’s face and gently push him away.

“I think we’re going to ruin each other,” he declared.

Jem still looked at his mouth. “What do you mean?”

“What if we don’t like this? What if you’re bad in bed?” Jem laughed when Mako said that, and Mako was deeply glad things had worked out the way he wanted them to, as serious as their exchange had become. “What if we don’t work together and we stop calling each other and in a year we only talk when we awkwardly run into each other at parties and film screenings, and all of our art becomes weird obvious testimonials about how we totally shouldn’t have started sleeping together when we were perfect as just friends, and one day when we’re sixty-three we’ll end up in the same rest home and die of heartbreak having wasted our entire lives avoiding the best people we ever had in each other’s lives, i.e., each other?”

Jem had the grace to look blithe. “Someone certainly thinks highly of himself,” he said in a mock-undertone, and then they were laughing, Jem putting his head against the back of the sofa, right next to Mako’s. Mako watched every detail of Jem’s face, this face he has always been fascinated with - his gap-toothed smiliness, his natural Māori narrowness of two perfect hazel eyes. 

“I’m scared,” Mako uttered.

“Me too,” Jem conceded.

Initially, they moved in to kiss once more - and oh, how easy it would have been to slide into that perfect whatever of a relationship, untethered by anything in their lives - but then Mako shook his head and said, “No, no, it’s too risky, it’s…” His eyes rounded and glazed over with the utmost love. “I don’t want to lose you.”

Jem looked entirely earnest when he replied, “I’m not going anywhere.”

“ _ Now _ ,” Mako retorted. “ _ Now _ you’re not going anywhere. Aroha said the same… the same thing.”

Jem got it immediately. It made perfect sense for Mako to be gripped by such apprehension.

“I’ll wait,” is what Jem said. “Don’t answer me right now. I’ll wait.”

“What if I say no?”

Jem’s mouth quirked sideways, sad, and he shrugged his shoulders. What  _ if _ Mako had said no? What would their relationship have turned out to be, a transcontinental heartbreak with so many casualties - their mutual friendships, the people they and Kory could have become, all the films and the songs and the poems and the plays they’d have written about and for and with each other - how much would have died with a single “no”?

Aroha, among billions of people worldwide, was of the belief that love was worth it and ever desirable even if and sometimes because of the fact that it might temporarily or permanently burn the will to live right out of you, even if it never meant anything in the grand scheme of things (that beautiful person you adored though you only ever looked upon them from across a classroom or a bus terminal or a laptop monitor), even if - and this is the most important part - even if it didn’t or could not last forever, for more than mere seconds at a time even. And could it, really? Could love last forever? Was it wise and worldly to love love when it couldn’t?

Mako didn’t think so. Mako believed more in unicorn shit. He'd been beaten way too tired and old by love to think that glorifying pain, brevity, and heartache even in the pursuit of sublime pleasure wasn’t some kind of mildly disrespectful, not to mention reductive. If he was going to love someone, he was sticking it the fuck out. None of that skinny love, popcorn love, blink and you'll miss it love - no thank you. He was in it for the almost perfect, certifiably unattainable long run. Until he got that, he'd rather have been alone.

Mako and Jem watched the news until Mako began to drift. That night, Mako slept on the sofa bed instead of as he had before with Jem, and the next day, they all tried to make cookies and failed miserably, pulling a crumbly golden brown sea out of the oven and laughing and letting Kory eat it with a spoon. 

The custody battle was nonexistent. Nobody doubted that Aroha didn’t want Kora Mae, and this was weird in the court’s eyes to be sure - a mother not desiring her own child - but it was a sad fact of life that everyone just had to accept. At the time, Kory wasn’t affected too much, being a fixture in Tatum, Loren, Jami, and Rui’s arms; nor did she care about being perfectly groomed and spotless as any young lady should, as messy a little girl as she was, with unkempt hair and stains on her oversized T-shirts and scabs being picked painstakingly off of her legs and arms before being popped into her grimy little mouth. Mako and Jem, her parents from damn near the beginning, took her to Lyall Bay and let her stand on three year old legs in the shallow water. When she tried to swim, Mako said, “Shh, come back, fish. You’re not good at that yet.” And this along with many other tapes of Kory dancing along to jam sessions with the Teasippers and running around the house before bedtime joined the ranks of the videographed memories of her early life, stored on DVDs that lie in some bottom drawer in Mako’s office somewhere.

In the morning, right before leaving for her first day of sophomore year, Kory picks a scab from a Stevie cat scratch and blinks sleepily at her breakfast of French toast and banana slices. Mako rubs a hand over her head. “Are you okay?” he asks. “How’re the legs?”

“Adequate,” she mumbles. All of a sudden, affection overtakes her and she is looking at her father, saying, “I love you. Thank you for everything.”

Mako isn’t quite sure what to say, but this rarely keeps him from saying anything.

“You’re welcome, Kora. I love you too.”

  
  
  



	27. 27

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> woahhhh this was fast. i have a lot of feelings about this book and i've been working on it for three years now, so now this chapter of my life is kind of over just like the book is over. i hope you enjoy it.
> 
> trigger warning: major character death in this chapter

#  _27_

On a clear early August day in New Orleans, Mako takes his mother to Ochsner Baptist to undergo the King Kong of radiotherapy: total body irradiation, followed by a bone marrow transplant and, hopefully, life. Four days later, Rui Ngata dies at seventy-seven years old, pissing blood, holding her son’s naturally dominant left hand. She dies a haggard, wrinkled, fuzzy thing, and Mako is stark dead in love with her. 

In her last days, Mako helps Mum with crossword puzzles. She doesn’t know that much about American films, so he supplies her with his ample knowledge and listens to her wax poetical about the biology shit he isn’t familiar with, coughing progressively with every solved clue. Kory arranges new bouquets of calla and tiger lilies in her room every day and Jem is out in Uptown New Orleans, grabbing lunch from Dat Dog and Sarita’s. Eventually, at the end of it all, Mako sends Kory out of the room to help Jem take the food out of the car. Once alone, he climbs into his mother’s wheeled bed with her and lets her lean on him while he kisses her until the expanse of skin from her forehead to her temple is damp with his saliva, him always a drooly baby. Yellowy-red soaks through the crisp white sheets, and Mum goes just like that - totally at peace - and Mako doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t know if it’s fair or not. He waits until Jem and Kory are coming laughing into the room, then opens his mouth.

“ _Get out!_ ” he cries, waving his hands in the air. “ _Get out!_ Don’t let Kory see, don’t come in here!”

Without having to be told twice, Jem is crowding Kory out of the room and Mako can hear her crying somewhere far away. He puts his head down against Mum’s and weeps.

There’s a bunch of shit to arrange all of a sudden. They’d gone with Mum’s wishes and did a pre-need, but now there’s the phone call that needs to be made to the funeral home and picking a date and notifying whoever needs to be notified. Priya. The Brazilian lady down the street. Ezra, maybe. The CCCrew and anyone in Mako’s immediate circle that might want to make an appearance, like Annie or Alyssa. Predictably, the moment they step into the house at 9:12 PM, Jem puts a hand on Mako’s arm and just says, “I’ll take care of it,” then kisses the side of his face and walks into Mako’s office with his phone already in his hand. Mako supposes it’s time to talk to Kory, but she’s already gone upstairs and shut her bedroom door, and somehow, he doesn’t feel like he should poke his head into that right now. 

So he takes the stairs.

He takes them one step at a time.

The house is different in the wake of such a loss. In the end stages of her life, Mum ceased to be the Type A empress she’d been for so many decades, and it shows in the house. In the books splayed on the coffee table and the lack of Portuguese whispers in the living room, and the dust, and the ants slowly conquering the garden. In the lint peppering the rugs, old pieces of paper and potato chip fragments and hair babies, dying plants, overflowing hampers. In the toothpaste lingering in the upstairs sink and the bloodstain that wasn’t properly treated out of Kory’s T-shirt and the unmade beds. No more _The Chew_ or _Will and Grace_ on Hulu, and Mum’s car keys haven’t left the key bowl in weeks. 

Suddenly Mako is in his bedroom. He takes one shoe off, struggles with the other one and decides it is too much of a hassle. He gets in bed in all of his street clothes, and in snatches, Jem tells him stuff like, “The funeral is in two days,” and, “I’m ordering pizza for dinner,” but on the whole, Mako sleeps. For forty-six hours, he sleeps. He dreams of Raukokore, of an elaborate journey through color, night, value, ideas, events, and settings. He rips time apart with his bare hands. 

Imagine a Marxist vision of the school system - a panoptical _whare_ where the kids wear jumpsuits and walk in parallel lines. Mako ran away from that into a world where he was instantly greeted by wolves and a top-knot samurai, and families parked their cars in the adjacent lot, preparing to see and play in the new snow. Mako mounted Madonna bareback and rode home, to the kauri tree and the smallish stable next to the goat pen. He said hi to Tina Turner on his way to the door, and it was nighttime, and Nana Victoria was inside sitting in front of _I Love Lucy_. 

It has been demonstrated that Mako was extremely close with his Nan; she was, in fact, his best friend. In some ways, on some days, Victoria Ngata was more Mako’s mother than Rui was, if you want to go by Alyssa the ballerina’s definition of motherhood and consider Nana Victoria’s more consistent and tender care as well as the the way in which Rui’s career and bipolarity necessitated her spending a lot of time away from home or otherwise away from Mako. Victoria, on the other hand, spent all of her time at home, all of her time with Mako.

Many Raukokore nights, Mako would sit as a little (and sometimes a medium) boy in Nana Victoria’s bed, or in some configuration on or across her lap as Nana enthralled him with her sophisticated knowledge of sixties and seventies sitcoms and stories from their ancestral past. 

“Your mother, she hated being picked up,” she’d say, not very loudly, but not as if the words were intended for their ears only. “Her grandfather or Moerangi would try to pick her up off the floor and she would become a suction cup with no bones, stuck to the floor, an immovable object!” Nana laughed, her wild hair in her face after a day of it being confined by a bandana. “ _You_ , on the other hand.” She hooked her arm around Mako’s body and pulled him into her side, and he hid his laugh in her chest. “As a baby, you were always like a suction cup stuck to everyone who loved you. Your mother. Your father, the few times I’ve met him. Me.”

Mako _hmmm_ ed.

“My _moko_ .” Mako loved when she slipped into _te reo_ , their secret language. Nana Victoria gazed up and out of the window, and the kauri tree in front of the house grew gold chrysalis fruit, and Raukokore breathed on, full of blood and water and sweet, sweet things. 

Mako dreams of himself as a house - a haunted house, with the faces of Victoria, Rui, Molly, Harry, and all the other dead ones peering out of the windows of his eyes. This is very frightening, and he does not wake up.

Some nights, there would be exorcisms. Instead of the TV, Nana Victoria would watch Mako walk around in frantic circles on the living room carpet, disturbing the vacuum cleaner lines winding paths across the room and into the corners where the teal dye was uneven. Mako would pick his frustrations away one by one out of the open carcass of his mind, and it would be the only time past the age of eleven that he’d let himself act anything but perfectly in control. This he got from Ezra, who haunts him as well.

Nana was loosely Christian; Rui was not. Nana cleaned her shoes with a toothbrush, dried them in the sunshine, and then wore them to church on special Sundays, like when Christmas was on a Monday or one of the goats was sick or Mako needed to make an A on a paper. For the most part, Mako’s mommies let him choose whatever he wanted to believe in, and Mako spent days and nights climbing the Raukokore hills searching for the Truth that laid in the caves along the beach. He’d just come home afterwards, to this womb called the farm, and find his mom sweeping the front porch, angry as sin at him for being gone so long. She was the Truth, and he was so scared and so blind sometimes it was hilarious.

They danced. Mako never told anyone ever - not even Jem, not even Kory, nobody in New Orleans and nobody in New Zealand, either - but he and his mother danced. They danced with Rui playing the part of the man, because even when Mako shot up to six feet tall, she’d always been the bigger and the stronger of the two of them. Her wild laugh and her broad, bearish body. Her hair swept across her back in sheets while _Romanza_ the Andrea Bocelli VHS played in the background, this Mako’s eleventh birthday present from Ezra. Growing up, Mako used to think Rui was an actual Māori goddess because of her force of will and her semi-divine, almost Mauian nature; he wondered if his maternal grandfather was God, who left the world in a flash of light the moment he’d conceived Mako’s crazy mother.

His mother who chased him around the yard with a hose, crying, “You have to clean up after you come back from the hills! I’m not raising a pig!”

His mother who let him put _Romanza_ on every night for a week before finally cutting him open over dinner, saying, “It sounds like we live in a funeral home. Can we liven it up a little, kid?”

His mother who could not tolerate cats and barely tolerated Nana Victoria’s Australian Shepherd, but loved her fishies and her dolphins and her silly sea slugs with a fervor that verged on maniacal. 

His mother, rubbing his hands, finding his kiss with her head.

He was her exception, see. Unlike any other marine thing she’d placed in the drawers and cupboards where she’d stored her family - him, she’d structured his DNA herself and carried him into the world, knowing him before she’d even formed him in the womb.

They had what’s called a DYNAMIC. Their DYNAMIC was that of harlequins, where they taunted, teased, and picked at each other endlessly until the picking was bloody and the leftovers were gore. It was all love-picking, though, and it almost all stemmed from the singular fact that Rui Ngata’s affection for others more often than not manifested as a world of hairsplitting and belligerent advice intended to steer those she cared for down the right path. In a way, Mako mirrored this trait in the context of their relationship, and this is why and how they fought so violently. 

When he was a kid, Mako liked to throw fits. Maybe not once a day, but often enough for a neurodivergent child of his age cohort. Some of these fits concerned objects that were admittedly frustrating from a parental standpoint. 

“What is it with you today? You’re acting so weird!” Rui would declare as she tried to pick and fuss and ruffle and pet over and all around Mako, and Mako would just whine and breathe as hard and as loud as he could, loathe to be touched, loathe to exist at all.

“Why can’t you just eat your dinner like all good children who get presents from Santa do?” she’d utter the week before Christmas with an almost vicious sarcasm as Mako painstakingly scraped apart the territories of the rice and the salad on his plate, and oh Mako would want to fling his fork at her head then.

“Well, thank you, you horrible cuntmother, I appreciate the three dollars you spent on me today,” she’d grumble, alligator-like, on her way out of his room after she’d presented him with a Yellow shirt she’d bought for him at a thrift store in Tauranga, knowing as she did that Mako at that age could not bear to wear yellow clothes.

“Oh, get back in the shower and deal with it like the rest of the world!” bellowed across the sun room as Mako came in dripping in a towel and soap pauldrons to tell her that her shampoo, the butterscotch, wasn’t the right one for him, who preferred peppermint. And really, it was all so funny to Rui. At the end of her life, in that last moment, it was fucking hilarious for her to look back and think: “My son, top of his class, magna cum laude of the whole wide world, a literal autistic genius, a writer and a father and a lover and a sinner, is quite possibly the fussiest little man in the universe, and he used to be too proud to even hold my hand in public, and I have changed his dirty diapers and watched him literally projectile piss onto my ex, and if that isn’t the funniest thing in the world, I swear.”

It was cyclical, as all things in their lives were and will forever be. Rui making breakfast for Mako and taking a day off to drive him to school and reading him mythology from Nana’s old books and answering his questions about sex and Ezra and fish. The perfection of those days, which Mako will remember and forget to remember for the rest of his life. Then there were the spanking nights, in rooms filled with darkness and the screaming of Great-Uncle Harry. There were the days when her patience for Mako’s especial preference for what bowl he ate cereal out of wore thin, finite as it was. She ate him like a bear trap sometimes, disciplining him until he caved and crumpled and folded beneath her geophysical pressure. She called it love; he called it abuse. Have at that what we will.

Mako had attitude, though, We all know this. He had headstrength and gall and piercing, kind of mean intelligence the likes of which his mother identified fully. Sometimes she grabbed him by his pretty mouth and told him, “Watch it, you. You’re too smart for your own good.” And Mako kept being smart until the day she died - a day on which his particular degree of smartness hovered somewhere at the low end of the spectrum and he was much more interested in being kind than being clever. 

A lot of it was heartbreaking, when you break it down to its very foundational levels. Mako has always felt very intensely frustrated and alone, has always suspected to some extent that he naturally triggered the hatred of others, including his mother. He’d really think his own mother hated him in her unforgiving, quicksilver nature, the way she laid upon him like a hot pad of metal and made his skin red and blistery. Played a guitar note wrong? Got in a non-talkative mood? Fought the Short twins at school? Refused to go to school entirely because it was an awful, awful place from which no good came? Mum sat upon him with all her cetacean weight with a quickness upon the enactment of these conditions, and Mako - eleven, twelve, thirteen, and fourteen years old - didn’t know that his mother was flawed or existed on her own terms. She just hated him, and that was the end of the story, the end of Mako’s life in his pubescence, from which he was born again and sprang anew into a crazed, guilty creature that skulks the Earth to this day.

We are familiar with Rui’s manic rage. How the shifts into it happened without warning, and it streaked through the scene like a forest fire, leaving dead animals and ashes in its wake. _It’s just how she was sick_ , Mako tells himself in his dream, tells himself crying in his sleep over his dead, dearest Mum. The dream changes, and he’s drawing on himself with a Sharpie. 

_Oh, it’s this scene_ , Mako thinks. We’re getting closer now. 

Mako liked to draw on anything he could get his hands on. Many sheets of copy paper from Mum’s Tauranga office, and Nana’s old stationary, which for some reason she kept even after he’d destroyed it with depictions of samurai and striped sharks with laser blasters fixed to their heads. The walls in Nana Victoria’s house, his _r_ -shaped crayon drawings of lightstanders down the hallway to the very back where the sun room laid. Sometimes the inorganic didn’t satisfy and Mako turned his pen upon his own skin, scrawling out _koru_ swirls and cherry blossoms and the sort of Edo period/American comic book style that he was curating for himself as an early teen. This aroused the deepest ire in Mum, which is why when she found him one winter weekend when he was twelve, she was on him like a fly on shit, instantly angry. 

“What the _hell_ did I tell you about drawing on your skin, you big _doongi?!_ ” This, yelled as she snatched the Sharpie out of Mako’s hand and flicked it thoughtlessly across the room. “This is the last time I’ve seen you ruin yourself like this because next time, I’m gonna skin you alive and throw your skin in the washer!”

Mako grimaced severely at the grotesque mental image. “It’s just ink,” he argued stupidly. “I can just wash it off.”

“Oh, you’re going to wash it off.” Mum said ominously, grabbing him by one desecrated arm and tugging him sharply to his feet. She started to drag him in the direction of the door. “I’ll show you how you’re going to wash it off, matey boy.”

She made Mako make the fire all by himself. Made him find the kindling wood at the back of the property and light it with a match and stack on the smallish two-by-fours until the fire was substantial enough to burn on its own. She made him fill the tub with cold water befitting the season and watch it until tiny bubbles began to pop on its surface but it did not fully boil. She stripped his winter clothes from his body and, powered by adrenaline or mania or God, her father, Himself, threw his whole body into that scalding tub and chunked the soap and the sponge at his head, yelling, “If you’re not spotless in twenty minutes you’re going to be sorry!”

And he cried. And she said, “I’ll give you something to cry about,” which was her favorite thing to say probably ever when Mako was between the ages of twelve and fourteen.

She swarmed over him like a mosquito for a week and eventually he broke down, crying, begging not to be stung. 

“I just wanted to read it, Mum, I’m sorry!” he’d plead with her in the kitchen, holding out to her her Evanovich book that he’d stolen from her without thinking. 

“But if it’s my property, Mako, why would you take it without asking me?!” Mum cried with a sort of hysterical rightness about her - her logic pristine, her anger indomitable. Mako sobbed hard then, and there she went - “I’ll give you something to cry about!” - and proceeded to take all of Mako’s books off of all of the shelves in the house. Afterward, she laid down in her room and, when Mako came and tried to apologize, called him “self-righteous” and “hateful.” Mako just cried harder, and for the next week, they barely spoke. 

“She loves you, _moko_ ,” Nana Victoria said on Friday night of that week, circling her fingers into Mako’s scalp as he wept a little on her shoulder. “She loves you so much. She wouldn’t be taking the piss out of you at every turn if she didn’t. That’s just how she loves.”

“I know,” Mako uttered with a sniffle, sitting up in the California king and rubbing at his nose and eyes. “But it’s like… she loves me, so she yells at me and makes me feel like I’m an idiot all the time.”

Nana Victoria said nothing to this, just moved her hand from Mako’s hair to her own. She pulled the ends of her silver tresses apart and looked profoundly sad in a way Mako couldn’t handle. He’d never seen his Nan so somber. 

“I feel like she doesn’t care about what happens to me or what I do so long as I’m like, safe from having a feeling or an experience that’s offensive to her or makes me imperfect, or something.”

“I think you may be onto something,” came Nana Victoria’s matter-of-fact reply. She opened her arms to Mako, and Mako slid into them perfectly, and the night sort of clicked and creaked around them, all the visceral sounds of Raukokore singing them into a blind-drunk stupor that made the night okay instead of simply tolerable. _Wow_ , Mako thought. _What am I going to do with love like this?_

In a dream, Mako walks down into an _Alice in Wonderland_ hole filled with smiling goats and farm tools. We’re as close as we can get. 

It was the summer after Mako turned thirteen. Earlier that day, Mako had formally graduated from the seventh grade in a ceremony involving flowers and song and the Short twins picking their noses and wiping their boogers on Mako’s back. For some reason - because it was Friday, Mako guessed - Mum was in a foul mood. From the moment he woke to the moment he got home from the ceremony, Mum scowled, picked at his skin and clothes and hair, and bitched about everything she could find - the way his hair stuck up or the crustiness in the inner corner of his eye and the time the ceremony started and how Paxton Kokoro the principal still believed he had a “thing” with her after all these years despite all evidence to the contrary. Mako ingested the bitching all day long like poisonous slop. Mum drove them home in her Mazda, wearing her nice blouse and smoking, for once, a cigarette out of the open window. Walking into the house, she slammed the front door behind her, yelling, “Go to your room! I don’t want to see you for a few hours.” Mako, instead, stood on the porch and looked at Tina Turner in her pen, lying on her side, sleeping. 

About an hour later, Nana Victoria got home from the hills, passed into the house covered in sweat and grass stains, and found her daughter in the kitchen, drinking a cup of coffee and doing a crossword puzzle.

“Hey, Rui,” Nana Victoria said with a wave, going over to the farmhouse sink to wash the dirt off her hands. Rui grunted in reply, and this stung a little, but Nana Victoria said nothing. “How was the ceremony?”

“Oh, what a day.” Rui was pulled instantly out of her crossword puzzle and into the sort of opinionated state she’d existed in all day. “You know, I find it strange and sad that we as parents are supposed to stomach the inane bullshit we have to do for our kids. I mean, it’s for the kids, so it’s great for them, but I know for a fact that Mako was not enjoying that ceremony today, and you know what? I wasn’t either!”

Sarcastically, Nana Victoria said, “At least it wasn’t all day.”

“Oh, you know it!” Rui picked up her puzzle and slapped it back down on the dining table. “Ridiculous!”

Nana Victoria dried her hands and looked at Rui for a long, contemplative moment before deciding to ask, “Where’s Mako?”

Rui jerked her thumb in the direction of the rest of the house. “In his room. He’s kind of in a funk, as usual.”

Nana Victoria nodded and went to survey Mako’s room. When she found it empty, she checked the sun room, the bathroom, her room, and all over the yard in the goat pen and underneath the carport. She found him nowhere, and running back into the house, she scrabbled for her car keys and yelled, “Rui! I’m going out!”

Rui came into the living room with her cup of coffee. “Why?”

“Mako is gone,” Nana Victoria said. Before Rui could explode like Vesuvius, she gave her daughter a pleading look and said, “Let’s just get in the car and go find him, please.”

So Rui put her rage in a box and they climbed into Nana Victoria’s hooptie, ready to drive around Raukokore to find their kid.

Mako, for his part, ran. He ran along beaches and through the golden-green color of the Bay of Plenty, ready to fly off to Australia, to gay sex and real love and a surrogate mom in Tasmania. He ran until he couldn’t breathe, laid among bullrushes like Moses the great old Jewish one, then continued to run until he was somewhere on the way to Tauranga, on a highway surrounded by verdant, sun-setting green and trees that blustered and spoke in the wind. Eventually, an old, old car approached him on the highway, and Mako recognized it immediately as Nana Victoria’s beige Coupe Deville, crawling to a stop with him a doe in its yellowy headlights. He expected Mum to come rupturing out of the car swinging for his head, but instead, he watched Nana and his mother talk heatedly to each other over the center console for three minutes before Nana Victoria exited the driver’s side door and began to walk to him, holding her hands out. 

“Hi, _moko_ ,” she said in her always lilting-loving voice. Mako watched her kind of like a spooked animal, but then she put her hands on him and he surrendered fully to tears, to apeshit losing his mind in the middle of nowhere. Nana and Mum and God and everyone watched him scream his lungs hoarse in the Bay of Plenty, because there was no denying that he’d just tried to run across the Tasman, and there was no having heart-to-hearts with thirteen year-olds with Asperger’s syndrome and no emotional vocabulary to speak of, and sick of balancing his mother and himself on opposite ends of the same scale, some days, like that day, Mako wished to be less than human. 

Nana Victoria clung to Mako as he cried harder than he’d ever cried in his life, him always such a big crybaby; such a girl; such a weird, impossible thing. “It’s just your mother,” she soothed him. “It’s just the way she is.”

“She’s not my mom!” Mako hollered, knowing everyone on the islands could hear him. “She’s a fucking cage with teeth locked around me, forever!” He believed he knew it then, what everyone had always secretly known and simply neglected to tell him - knew that mothers were made as natural pressure cookers into which their offspring and the whole entire world were inevitably scooped. He believed he knew that he as Rui Ngata’s son was made to suffer the horrible flattening beneath and within her. He was desperate for anything to make his mother happy, not knowing that she was happy, so happy to have him it nearly destroyed her identity. Nana Victoria had promised to her daughter that she would talk to Mako, but she simply held him instead, saying to him the things that she said, the things that forgave everyone and everything for their transgressions.

Eventually, she got him in the backseat of the car and parked herself back in the driver’s seat. Rui fumed, looking hard at Mako and yes - this was it, she was finally going to kill him. She opened her mouth, but Nana Victoria was the one who spoke.

“Rui Whetū, we’re going to go home, and if you say one more mean thing to that boy, I’m going to kick your beautiful Māori ass onto the highway.”

Rui closed her trap immediately. That, as we say, was the end of that.

Years passed. Mako grew up. By the time he was nineteen, he was hanging around the biology department at Victoria U, which had basically doubled as the nursery he’d been to as a toddler. Between survey classes on Eastern art and his beginner’s ballet course - dropped into his schedule in a moment of whimsy and as a dare by Jem - Mako dawdled in his mother’s office, playing a little with her brass dolphins and narwhals and looking at all her pictures of Bay of Plenty fish.

“What, you’ve got nothing better to do than bother me, boy?” Mum snapped with a playfulness on the edge of her voice, flipping through a grant proposal she was preparing to send to the dean. 

Mako gazed at _Squaloliparis tangaroa_ and pursed his lips. “Just wanted to say hi to you, I guess.”

“Hi, hello, good afternoon,” Rui huffed. She screwed her face up briefly in thought and glanced at the clock hanging alongside her office doorway. “It is afternoon. What class do you have next?”

“Ballet.” Mako gestured downward to the tights he was wearing over his Converse. “Twenty minutes.”

“Well, you better pirouette your way on over to the theatre, ya little nancy,” Mum pronounced with a deep, guttural laugh, and Mako couldn’t stay his smile, his silly and sweet giggle at his mother’s audacity.

He practiced the positions in ballet. One through five, arms and feet crisscrossing and arcing up and over, _coupé_ and _cou de pied_ , _ronde de jambes_ until he was out of breath and dizzied with his legs’ circular motion. After class, he ran into his mother hurtling her way across campus with papers in her arms, and she smiled at him and went along without speaking a word.

Hours later, in gym shorts and his orange tie-dye sweatshirt, he sat with his feet propped up against Mum’s desk back in her office, this time with Jem at his side. He whined, “My legs hurt like, _so bad_ , guys. I don’t know if I should have taken this class.”

“I knew you could endure through it,” Jem said proudly from his chair opposite Mako’s.

“That’s right!” Mum stood in front of her window, nursing a water bottle. “My son endures, he doesn’t run away with his tail between his legs.”

“No, man, quitting is kind of par for the course with me,” Mako argued, which wasn’t really true though he had no idea at the time. “It’s early enough in the semester for me to drop the class and add like, Children’s Lit to my schedule.”

“I forbid you,” Mum said. She ground the words out and pointed a finger directly into the center of Mako’s forehead. “That man that teaches Children’s Lit is an imbecile. He would have you dropping out of college to _write_ children’s lit in a duplex for the rest of your life.”

Again, Mako was laughing. Jem was laughing, too, which made things all the better. 

They talked about Dr. Wright’s passive, weirdly effete nature and Jem’s Comedy and Tragedy: The Real professor’s tendency to monologue like a stand-up comic in front of the class, how much they hated all that shit. Mum ate up this gossip and these overly accurate, mean descriptions of her co-workers with relish. Mako told his compatriots about how he was the only guy in his ballet class and about how fascinating ballet was - the language, the history, _Swan Lake_ and piano music and Russian people and ballerina feet - and Rui and Jem just sort of watched and listened to him go on forever in a manic spiral, loving him so hard it threatened to obliterate who they were as people.

“Where did all this come from?” Mum asked. “Why the sudden obsession over everything having to do with one subject?”

“I’ve always been like this,” Mako replied truthfully. “And you’ve always hated me for it.”

“Me?” Mum bugged her eyes at Mako. “I’ve always thought it was precious.” And she had.

“I don’t remember things that way,” Mako admitted while Jem pretended to look at his fingernails.

“You remember too much,” Mum retorted. “Put things down.”

 _Where?_ , Mako wondered. _Where do I put it all?_

He asked if he and Jem could sleep at Rui’s house that night, in the bedroom facing the street at 50 Salamanca Road. Mum asked how they’d brush their teeth, where would they get toothpaste, and Mako replied that they’d pick some up at the drugstore on the way home. They slept in Mako’s old Wellington bed and Mum slept less than twenty feet away. In the morning, Mako woke to his mother in the kitchen making coffee, her hair not yet up, her feet bare on the floor. 

Mako has always known that he would die for love. He thinks he’s dying because he’s waiting for it, not knowing that he has it, that he’s had it all along.

Several days before his graduation from Victoria, Mako spent a half-hour in his mother’s office while she tidied up after a week of professoring - her sweeping the floor with a little Wisebuys broom and filing so much paperwork into the various file cabinets positioned throughout the room. He was graduating magna cum laude, and Mum was so proud of him she couldn’t even speak it into being. 

“I feel like something bad is going to happen,” Mako admitted to her, helping her pack her reusable water bottle and student final papers into her messenger bag. He held the bag open while she dumped stuff into it, and he shook his head a little, watching his mother beneath eyelids that were lidded because, truth be told, he was scared of her reaction.

“Nothing bad can happen from now on,” Mum said with certainty. She patted him on the cheek and gave him a rare grin. “You’re a winner now, Mako.”

This is what he has of his mother: her hosing him off underneath the carport, and standing in front of a classroom of undergrads with her hair in a tight knot on her head, and driving the Mazda to Tauranga with some oldies in the tape deck, and all of her abdominal music when he’d lay his head down on her stomach. Dolphins, ink pens, a phone call every now and then when he and Jem lived off campus, and popsicles in the chemo lounge. After a person dies, it becomes a sort of responsibility to find everything that’s left behind and examine it anew, and Mako could stand on the precipice between the front door and the overgrown patio and look at all of Mum’s old plants, flourishing and dying all at once. He could look at the birthday moleskin she used in the last months of her life, could trawl through her notes about analogous structures and a new recipe for ratatouille that she wanted to try before she broke her hip and got so sick. He could call the next-door neighbor and tell them that their Rottweiler/spaniel mix is disturbing the sleeping persons in the house, knowing that they are one sleeping person down and that the roaches and mice will roost in Mum’s closet if he forgets to clean it. He could find all of Mum’s headscarves from her bald period and fold them one after one - not because anyone needs them per se, but because they were his mother’s and they held a special significance in her life that was prematurely extinguished.

He could do all of these things now. He will do them later, when some time has passed.

On Saturday, he wakes. Jem is gently jostling his shoulder, standing over the bed in his pajamas. When Mako becomes aware of this, he counts the things he can identify in his world: the sunlight gleaming across the bed in a golden stripe, and heat, and his perfect comforter swaddled around his aching body, and the love of his life leaning over him and speaking to him quietly.

“Mako?” Jem says. “It’s time to get up.”

Mako squints at Jem and it is as if he hasn’t been awake in years. “What time is it?”

“7:45 AM, give or take.”

“What day is it?”

“It’s Saturday. Your mum’s funeral is today.”

Oh, that’s right. Mako knew Jem would take care of things, but somehow he didn’t expect _things_ to be happening so soon. He sits up in bed and finds himself still wearing the shirt he was wearing when Mum died - a holey thing the color of jade and featuring the fat faces of Botticelli cherubs - and for some reason this breaks his heart, but he can’t find it in him to cry after crying so much in his sleep for the past two days. “What about work, I’ve been missing work-”

“Priya knows what happened.” Jem smiles warmly. “She and the office sent muffins. Muffins, dude!”

This touches some upper-inside place in Mako. “Kory?”

Jem’s smile broadens. “She’s been okay. She even went to school yesterday. Her friends made her a card.”

Mako puts his face in his hands. “I should have been there for her.”

Jem reaches to softly ruffle Mako’s hair. “She misses you, bro. I don’t think she’s mad at you at all.”

 _What if she’s traumatized by death now and I’ve ruined her forever, though?_ , Mako thinks psychotically. _What if she’s forever broken and fucked up like me?_

As if sensing the dark cloud burgeoning over Mako’s head in his bones, Jem gently grabs Mako by the face and puts their mouths together. This is enough to wake Mako up - out of his grim spiral and out of sleep alike - for now.

He puts on something nice-looking. A dark purple shirt and a smart suit jacket, because he’s never not been ridiculous. Because they’re the family and they need to be somewhat in charge of things, he, Jem, and Kory are the first to arrive at the grand, Victorian funeral home, and it’s weird to be just the three of them despite that being the way they’ve generally done things for the past six years. It’s weird having no one waiting there at home for them to come back, with groceries or coffee or just a weird story about their day.

Jem (or Kory) has made sure that tiger lilies are present in every corner of the room - in a gaudy, almost ostentatious way ill-befitting the occasion. Mum herself holds a tiger lily in her coffin, and she is wearing one of the few outfits she salvaged from her closet - a long burgundy dress with shoulder pads (which, like the flowers, is almost too much). Mako laughs about it, putting his hand against his face and closing his eyes tight. Prince Tui Teka streams quietly from speakers in the background - “ _Please wait for me, Mum. I'll be home very soon._ ” - and it is the perfect funeral for Ms. Rui Ngata, perfect for her, perfect for Mako.

Guests arrive. Annie Bailey is the first of them, and as soon as Mako sees her he is in tears again, sniffle-snuffling his way into her arms. “I’m so sorry,” she says into the curve of his neck, and he knows what he has to mean to her for her to be here, knows the interior of her heart as clearly as he has ever in this moment.

For some reason, Jackie from work and his wife also show up. Mako doesn’t know why, but he shakes their hands and says, “Thank you so much,” regardless.

The Brazilian lady and her daughter from down the street come hobbling in. Deniz and her beautiful Turkish mother, who hug Kory as soon as they can get their arms around her. This boy from Kory’s friend group who also gives her a hug after gauging Mako’s reaction to his presence. To all of them, Mako smiles and says, “Thank you, thank you so much for being here. It means a lot.”

He is eating cheese, grapes, and prosciutto at Jem’s shoulder when his ecosystem comes marching in. Godfrey and KC arm-in-arm, with Kai holding daddy’s hand. Gloria and Cynthia in black slacks, their wild hair pinned back away from their faces and no makeup on. June trailing the bunch in a stunning ensemble that is somehow fantastically okay for a funeral, looking like she washed her hair and got some sleep for once. Mako literally screams at them as soon as they enter the room, and they are screaming back, and then they are just six screaming adults and one confused child in the middle of everything, hugging and kissing each other and crying.

“You’re okay, man,” Godfrey says once Mako is weeping in his arms - this the first time he has ever done this despite their eight-year friendship and the intimacy between them. Godfrey and KC are both rubbing his back in tandem, cooing at him - “You’re okay. You’re okay.”

Mako’s not too sure about that, but it’s nice that they want him to think so. He kisses KC’s forehead and holds her so tight, and Cynthia (the stoic old bitch) even gives him a hug, which makes him want to die even more.

For some reason, Americans think that families ride in a limousine from the funeral home to the graveyard. Mako isn’t sure where that idea came from, but KC summarily notifies him of its existence when, stepping out of the funeral home, she looks around and asks, “Where’s y’all limo?”

Mako points at Jem’s lozengey Hyundai. “There it is,” he says, and KC laughs way harder than the joke calls for. He kind of loves her for it.

Mum is interred in an above-ground grave at St. Roch Cemetery #2, which is a six-minute drive and a twenty-minute walk from the house. Mako chose this cemetery because he knew he’d always need Mum close to him, especially at night when he wrestled with sleep. Watching her in her pretty cedar box going into a cement hole is almost too much for Mako to bear, so he hides his face in Jem’s neck and Jem just holds him close, unspeaking. Kory is crying again, so Mako is putting his hand on her head and bringing her in to cling to his chest. 

This is who they are now, he supposes - a threesome for the next forty years or so, until one of them gets picked off by cancer, suicide, or simple old age. In his head, Mako contemplates this time - this time when they will be so old that their bodies will fall apart and he will follow Mum, Nana, and everyone else into that hole. He wants to stretch out his hands to them. He’ll wait for that day, but for now, he sleeps at night.

When Jem moved to New Orleans, it was six years ago in the hurricane swirl that was year 2019. Political unrest in the Western world and the rapid advancement of the anthropocene hung in the air like a bad smell. It didn’t matter that much, though, because Mako was in love and Jem was coming to live with him in this cesspool he’d chosen as his home for the rest of their years - or at least a trial period of six months, while they figured out how a romantic relationship worked. 

Mako picked Jem up from the airport as he always did. If he could have had one smell on his hands forever, it would have been the scent of Jem, which then had yet to blend with his and melt into the habitual and the mundane. In the baggage claim on the second floor, they hugged each other so hard and tried to kiss as surreptitiously as possible, hiding from the old ladies and the dudebros waiting alongside them. As the elevator doors closed on them, Mako leaned into Jem, who wrapped an arm around his shoulders and pulled him in for a kiss that they could watch in the elevator’s reflective metal doors.

That night, Mako didn’t sleep for hours. At first it was just unpacking shit with Jem, showing him all the things that had been delivered already and finding places for all of Jem’s clothes among his frankly excessive surplus of apparel. By 2:00 in the morning, though, things had turned into Mako watching Jem sleep in his New Orleans bed for the first time ever, petting his hair a little bit and telling him everything he’d wanted to tell him but never could.

“You’ve changed it,” he whispered, and the night beat on around them. “You changed everything.”

And everything would change. That’s just sort of the way it goes.

In August 2025, KC and Godfrey play silly games with their listeners on the air. They ask their disciples to call in and tell them the end of stories before explaining the beginning - “And that's how I ended up peeing on a state trooper," one says. "And that's how I ended up at an AA meeting with my bikini on.” Godfrey talks about how he met KC, eleven years ago when Obama was president and he was still a lawyer at Penderghast Gautam and Spiegel. He tells the story of their introduction through a mutual friend (June, who was Godfrey’s old classmate at Loyola and trawled through Uptown when KC still called that neighborhood home), the bar called Cellar Door in the Warehouse District, KC’s fucking cat-eye eyliner and her shapely breasts in an orange blouse, the juiciness of their first kiss. KC laughs, and when a listener calls in to tell Godfrey to “shut the [bleep] up and get a room,” Godfrey just asks, “What radio station caused this emotion in your body?”

“97.9 KLOY!” the listener hollers, and Godfrey plays Santana and Ms. Lauryn Hill on the 5:00 drive home. Mako smiles, loving his friends so much.

The next day, a Thursday, Mako drives to the Yen-Ramsey household with a book KC has been pestering him to give back - _Lolita_ , which is a novel only they could like together. When he drives up, Godfrey is standing on the porch on his phone while Kai plays out in the front yard, which is kind of dangerous and weird in their particular neighborhood, but Mako reasons that Godfrey is watching so there’s nothing unsafe going on. He ruffles Kai’s hair before stepping onto the porch and listening impolitely to Godfrey’s phone conversation.

“Jesus, Allie, I have a kid, you know,” Godfrey says into his phone, waving at Mako without looking at him. “Kai is about to be seven. I don’t have money to just throw around and buy a restaurant with.” There’s a sort of hilarious beat, then - “I mean, I know I’m big pimpin’ - what I’m saying is I don’t want to buy a restaurant with you. What are mom and dad even saying about it?” Big pause. “Right, because you’re the successful one in the family.” Mako detects sarcasm; Godfrey smirks at him. “Look, I have a visitor, okay? I’ll call you later and fuss at you again to _not buy a restaurant_. Goodbye.” Without waiting for a reply, Godfrey hangs up, looking at Mako like he’s about to shed his skin through sheer force of will. “Jesus Christ!”

Mako, sitting back on one of Godfrey’s porch chairs, twists his face up in sympathy. “Tough phone call?”

“My brother has it in his head that he’s going to buy a restaurant with my parents’ big fat plastic surgeon money.” Godfrey puts his phone down on the arm of Mako’s chair and proceeds to bellow vowels into the air. “I’m so mad that my parents like him! He’s literally a piece of shit!”

“That’s exactly how I feel about my older sibling, so like, join the club,” Mako says with a wry smile.

Godfrey smiles at Mako with all his teeth in the slightly uncanny way he has, then leans forward and kisses Mako’s forehead. “How are you, my friend?” he asks, weirdly nice, watching Kai run around in circles with a blanket in the front yard.

Mako tries not to think about how darling Godfrey is when he’s being a good friend. “I’m surviving. I’ve finally progressed to the stage where I’m able to get up in the morning and, you know, eat something.”

“Hey, that’s great!” Again, Godfrey is smiling, and it’s great how warm that makes Mako feel, just looking at his beautiful friend stand on his porch and smile. “Get those calories in, dude. See daylight every once and awhile.”

“I have to go back to work on Monday,” Mako notes, scratching idly through the hair on his jaw. “I’ve burned through all my allotted weeping and crying days and Priya really wants to cash in on how good my writing is about to be in the wake of such a loss.”

“That was really dark,” Godfrey remarks blithely.

“It was,” Mako concedes, looking a little shamefaced.

“You’re allowed to be dark.” Godfrey finally takes the Nabokov out of Mako’s hands. “Your mommy just died. You get to be literally any kind of way you want to be until you die.”

Mako is done crying, so he just smiles sweetly at Godfrey, reaching out to hold his hand for a moment.

They watch Kai play. Eventually the boy progresses from the superhero roleplay to building Legos in pyramidal formations (Godfrey says this is proof that Kai has pharaoh’s blood in him, and Mako just barely suppresses the urge to yell, “We were kangz!”). Mako feels content enough to light up a Marlboro and share his lighter and a fresh cigarette with Godfrey, laughing when the man hisses with pleasure at the burn of tobacco and cries, “Better than sex!”

“KC wants to have a drink with you,” Godfrey says to Mako once the still between them has become entirely comfortable. “That’s what she told me before she ran to the Dollar Store. She said, ‘ _tell Mako I want to have a drink with him tomorrow_.’ So you should text her when you get a chance.”

Mako salutes Godfrey in a military fashion. “Will do, captain.”

“Also, like, for real though…” Godfrey expels a thick contrail of smoke into the air, then unfurls his mouth at Mako. “Thank you for being here. For moving to New Orleans, you know. You really make life cool, Mako.”

Mako gazes at Godfrey almost bashfully, almost begging to be red in his brown Māori cheeks. “You blowin’ smoke over there, friendo?”

Godfrey shakes his head, grinning like a supermodel. “Not even close.”

They hug before Mako leaves. Mako listens to LCD Soundsystem on his way home, then texts KC as soon as he walks inside the house.

#    
  


**Today** 6:59 PM

**mako gehringer  
** hey kace, i just got home from your house and your hubby told me you wanted to get your drink on

#    
  


Six minutes later, when Mako is back in bed with Stevie and getting ready to read something inane on his smartphone until Jem comes home with dinner, KC texts him back.

#    
  


**kc ramsey  
** omg yes i need to see your face and cry with you! you’re in the nascent stages of grief so you really need support now!

do u wanna go to cure and get a funny cocktail?

**mako gehringer  
** you’re literally the best ever. yes.

**kc ramsey  
** 7:30 pm, be there or be square <3

#    
  


So, at 7:34 on the last Friday night in August, Mako walks into Cure and finds KC with her grown-out platinum afro, commandeering a table and wearing her favorite sexy tank top.

“Hey!” she yells without thinking about it as soon as he’s in the door proper. “They have a spin on tequila sunrise with pineapple and jalapeno. Do you want to try it?”

Mako hugs KC hard enough to pull all the breath from her. “Of course I do,” he says earnestly, then regrets it fifteen minutes later when he remembers that he hates both pineapple and jalapeno. KC drinks his drink with relish and he orders a Moscow mule.

“I love you so much,” KC says to Mako without being prompted. She pulls her phone out and opens the YouTube app. “I wanted to show you this video yesterday, but I had to see your reaction, I couldn’t just text it to you.” 

They end up watching around sixteen videos of dark-skinned twinks voguing, ballroom culture breakdowns, and - in one insane detour down YouTube Recommendations Lane - Jamaican dancehall antics. Mako and KC scream with laughter amidst the pulsing music and the exclamations of “ _bumbaclot!_ ” coming from her phone, and KC has to run to the bathroom while the other people at adjacent tables shoot them varied and assorted looks, and Mako is forced to forfeit his sanity when KC shoots him a text notifying him that she’s literally peed her pants, and oh well. The night is young and perfect. Mako is sad, fucked up, and paralyzed with fear, but he has friends who will hold his hand and snicker at cocktail names with him, who will grab him in public and declare their neverending love for him. He walks KC to her car and helps her put napkins down on her seat so she doesn’t soak the suede with urine, and they’ve been laughing so much today, it’s awe-inspiring.

The day before Mako goes back to work, he sends an email to his father and texts Robbie. “Just saying hi and checking in,” he says twice, then notifies his two remaining family members of his mother’s death just in case Jem didn’t during the two days he “took care of things.” Robbie sends him a picture of a baby cow and says sorry for his “lots”, and Mako knows he’s probably only going to see Robbie a couple more times in his life barring the possibility that he might move back to New Zealand after the Second United States Civil War, and he’s more than okay with this. He and Robbie’s relationship is perfect as it is, considering everything that’s happened between them.

Ezra, on the other hand, sends back a long and devastating email that Mako reads at 1:45 in the morning on Monday, talking about Rui Ngata and his paralyzing love for her that turned out so tragically due to his freak homosexuality, alcoholism, and inability to talk about his feelings. Mako - who again, is done crying - just closes out of the email and thanks the universe that finally, his father has grown up and learned how to talk. Finally, he has reached that milestone of emotional maturity. Mako can die happy. 

He goes to work and there is a new succulent on his desk. Annie and Priya and the whole damn office are abuzz with excitement for his return, ready to see how he will perform now that he’s suffered so much. When Mako sits down at his work computer with his phone close to his left hand (he still hasn’t deleted his mother’s contact from his phone), he feels so impossibly tired as to break into pieces, but he’s ready to work for what feels like the first time in years. He’s ready to get at the good dark inner gooiness within himself and sell it to willing, eclectic New Orleanians. He hasn’t felt like this since he first showed up at _Endymion_ , and didn’t feel like that before since university. He talks about what this month will look like with Annie and Monica, drinks his two and a half cups of coffee, says hi to Priya and grins when she simply smiles behind her sunglasses, and sits down to write.

#    
  


> inside i wished i could break myself into ten people and give everybody i love one separate, special mako to love, and at the same time have the tenth mako to myself to just go aimlessly across the world, experience everything, love and sex and illness and even death. i spoke to my mother about this before she died. i wondered aloud what kind of life i would have to live to experience the breadth and the totality of human experience
> 
> and mum just kind of fell asleep on me
> 
> but now i’m starting to think that it doesn’t matter whether or not i experience the entirety of humanity  
> i’m experiencing myself, and that’s the best experience for me. i want to love everyone in my life with that in mind.

#    
  


On Tuesday, Mako checks the mail after driving home from work. He finds another Five Happiness menu, a small yellow package for Kory, a letter from Mum’s health insurance company, and a big envelope addressed to him, the return address reading: The Wellington Teasippers, 5 Margaret St, Wellington NZ 6012. Mako makes a thoughtful face at this last letter and goes inside to read it immediately.

Inside the big bluish envelope, Mako finds letters and postcards from Tatum, Loren, Quick, Jami, Stephani, Blaise, and even Stu. He finds a drawing of “a sad face,” according to Loren’s letter, from Baby Jeannie. He finds photographs of the Wellington Teasippers of the past, because Tatum decided to go totally digital with her retrospective and wanted to send him all the pictures she’s been scanning into her external hard drive.

 _Jem as a lifeguard_. This one, Mako had snapped in 2006 when he and Jem were living in the Hargreaves Flat and Jem worked in the theatre department at school but also as a sexy Jewish/Māori lifeguard part-time. Jem sits atop his tall lifeguard’s chair with his sunglasses on and a book open on his lap, waving at the camera, smiling.

 _Big smiles for the wedding_. Tatum and Loren grinning their heads off in a garden, Tatum in a busy dress from the 80s, Loren in her bridal gown. They had known each other for what seemed like forever at the time, and now, they’re all living out their dreams wherever they are in the world.

 _Huge fucking rip_. Stephani taking a hit off Mako’s old orange-and-blue bong, her hair a mess, her legs crossed Indian-style beneath her. It’s always occurred to Mako how much Stephani resembles his mother, but now, looking at this picture of her, it makes Mako bite his lip against the laugh begging to come out of him.

 _The director_. Kory sitting in Mako’s director’s chair as a four year-old, holding a stuffed octopus that’s about a third of her size and wearing Mako’s bandana on her wild wooly head. This was from the set of their film about internet lovers, and of course they never achieved wide release, but the Wellington theatre community ate it up for sure.

So many other photos from so many other times - Stu troubleshooting Mako’s MacBook in 2009, everybody in stage makeup and tights and high heels, so much smiling/crying/laughing Kory in the background of every photo, Mako and Tatum, Mako and Jem, Mako and all of their friends. “ _It’s strange_ ,” Tatum says in her letter. “ _We’ve spent so many years trying to get with the plan, and now all we want is for it to fall apart. I hope you’re falling apart in a good way, bro! I’ll try to come see you soon._ ”

Mako puts the letters and the pictures on his desk in one big spread, making sure he can see every individual object just by glancing at his desk. He shows Jem as soon as he comes home from work, and Jem smiles like he hasn’t smiled in years, grabbing his phone to call Loren or Tatum or somebody from their native side of the planet. Early the next morning, Mako sits at the dining table waiting for Jem to get back from Satsuma with dine-out green (as in pesto) eggs and ham; avocado toast; bagels with cucumbers, tomatoes, red onion, and cream cheese; and so-called “Popeye” juice. Coffee is brewing in the kitchen and Mako is fiddling with his new vape pen, the one he bought yesterday on the way home from work.

Kory comes walking downstairs with her short hair and her unicorn socks. She looks at her father at the table and she is profoundly fifteen, profoundly a young lady. Without speaking, she sits in the seat closest to Mako’s and puts her head down on the table so that she looks like a mop wearing an I DRIVE MY DESTINY T-shirt. Mako puts his hand on her crown.

“Good morning, fish,” he says, tossing his vape pen down on the table. “Jem’s about to pop in with breakfast. He got your green eggs and ham like you like it.”

Kory picks her head up and she’s smiling at him. For some reason, she doesn’t have her phone with her, and this is weird, being that she always - even in the day’s first moments - has her phone with her. Mako considers whether or not he wants to comment upon that, then decides to just savor the moment. 

“How’d you sleep?” he asks instead. He’s been asking her this so much lately.

“Okay, I think,” Kory says in her voice that is slightly cottony with slumber. “I had a weird dream and then I woke up in the middle of the night and thought for a long time before going back to sleep.”

“What did you think about?” 

“I was thinking about how I’m kind of grown up now - I’ve had all the intermediate grown-up experiences, see - and so I should get on to, you know. The advanced grown-up stuff.”

If Mako could blanch, he would. As it is, he’s having a hard enough time trying to keep it together. “Are you saying you want to lose your virginity?”

Kory looks horrified. “No! I want to smoke weed and get a tattoo!”

Mako throws his head back and laughs with his whole stomach, and though Kory hates him for it at first, eventually she’s laughing too, at the ridiculousness of everything and her own silliness as a teenager. After so long of being unable to really laugh, Mako has been getting his real, true fill of it lately (probably fattening up for emotional winter, so to speak).

This is the process of getting better. He’s getting better, and it’s still so early, and he’s getting better anyway.

Tonight, he looks in the mirror and goes a little insane. He passes through the green of August in New Orleans in his twentieth century hooptie and walks through a fluorescent supermarket, collecting bone-in chicken thighs, Jenkins Jellies Hell Fire Pepper Jelly, sweet potatoes, peaches. He has slow and confusing dreams at night, but life is beautiful because Stevie woke up in the morning and said it was. He doesn’t fold his clothes perfectly like Nana, but neither the dead nor the living hold it against him. How wonderful is it to live in a world where in hurricanes, the rain sounds like the sea; to live in a city where women walk with comedy and tragedy masks painted on their bare tits for Mardi Gras. How wonderful - the melt of chile jam against chicken thigh, the smell of a menthol vape pen, and Jem playfully insinuating to Mako that he’s gone back to being his wife again, and Mako just throwing a knife at him in reply.

“Jeeze, babe, homicidal much?” Jem says with a laugh. They eat chile jam chicken with caramelized sweet potatoes and peaches for dinner, and Jem and Kory sigh with such relief now that Mako’s back to being in charge of dinner, and afterwards Mako goes to sit on the patio and smoke his vape pen, and he considers the ant pile at his feet. 

The heaviness of the house. 

Jem comes peeking out of the front doorway, saying, “Kory wants to have a dance party.”

Mako shrugs. It’s really hot outside. “Let her,” he says.

“No, I mean right now,” Jem clarifies. “With both of us.”

Mako snorts. “Come sit with me for a few minutes? Then we’ll dance.”

Jem doesn’t say anything, just comes ambling across the patio to sit at the chair opposite Mako’s.

Mako plays with his smoke, making rings and little tornados. It’s just after sunset, so the sky is a deep purply blue, the color of a slightly cold blueberry. Jem hums a little naïve melody, and when Mako leans over to kiss him, he comes to him willingly and nimbly, sort of inhaling the smoke out of his mouth. For maybe the sixtieth time in their lives, Mako licks Jem’s teeth, and only now does Jem say, “Ew, gross, did you just lick my teeth?”

“I lick everything else in your mouth, what’s the big deal?”

“I mean it’s just…” Jem makes a face of patent disgust. “We just ate dinner.”

“God, another forty years of this, can I bear it?” Mako yells into the sky.

Kory puts on some loud Joy Division picked directly out of Mako’s Spotify library; cue the following exchange:

“Where the hell did you find this song?”

“From your playlist! Jem got us a family Spotify account while you were in your coma so we could all listen to each other’s stuff for less money.”

Mako hugs Jem and Kory at the same time. His family is so great, it makes him weak.

They dance. Kicking feet and jumping in the air and beating their chests. Eventually Mako trips over Kory’s foot and falls hands-down on the floor, the middle finger of his left hand splaying out weird and cracking with an audible _pop!_ This is enough to override Mako’s built-in shield against further tears and have him weeping and laughing pathetically on the floor, looking at his obviously broken finger and thinking about the stupid shit that has to be done to fix it. 

Jem drives Mako to Ochsner Baptist Emergency Room and fills out all his medical information on the forms they give them, putting down “Buddhist” when they ask about Mako’s religious beliefs. Kory is at home with strict instructions not to call boys, and while she looked a little put out by this directive, she quickly cheered up and said ambiguously, “There’s always Deniz.” As a result, Mako is now talking at Jem in the lobby of the E.R., asking him, “Do you think Kory is bi? The bi child of two bi parents? Do you really think I could have achieved that miracle?”

“How’s your finger, mate?” Jem asks, flipping a sheet over and signing Mako’s name wherever it needs to be signed.

Mako holds the washcloth and the melty ice cubes in his hand and shakes his head. “Killer.” It occurs to him that he wouldn’t trade one stupid decision he ever made for another seven years or so of life.

Because Mako’s injury is intermediate, on the scale from trivial to life-threatening, he gets placed in a room in intermediate time. Jem sits with him while he lays back on his little wheeled Transformers hospital bed, asking the nurse if she could bring him more ice when it appears that all of the ice from home has melted. They find ABC on the overhead television and watch\ syndicated _Shark Tank_ for a half-hour before anyone comes around to really look at Mako’s finger. In between nurses, Jem steps out to use the bathroom, and Mako, surprising himself, loses it.

We are alone in our bodies and there is pain associated with that. Mako feels the pain of his loneliness like he would if he was in a bad film, like a cartoon character with a big beating heart. He’s crying, and his finger fucking hurts, and he’s alone. Jem slips back into the room, sees him weeping like a fool, and predictably gushes with concern.

"Oh my God. What's wrong?"

"I don't-” Mako tries to articulate, finds that, “I can't-"

"I... I don't know what i'm supposed to do.” Jem, dumbfounded, sort of hovers his hands around Mako, touching him lightly without really settling down on him. “Do you. Do you want something?” Frowning, damn near panic himself, Jem pleads, “What do you want?"

"I just-” Mako looks at his finger, and at Jem, and at the perfect white ceiling. “I want my family and my life and everything, normal, right here."

"We are right here,” Jem says, holding their hands close together. “As for normal, I can't help you there, mate."

"You're going to die one day,” Mako announces.

Initially, Jem appears stung, but he just frowns and says, "I know."

Mako sniffles loudly. "I want you right here. I don't want to be alone, I want you here."

"I'm here,” Jem soothes. “I'm right here with you."

Jem holds Mako while he cries, cries for everything - cries for Mum and Nana Victoria and Robbie and Ezra and Aroha and the three of them. He says, "We're here. You're here. Hush. You’re here." For another hour, they wait for Mako’s finger to get formally and predictably diagnosed broken, and then he is sent home in a cast at 12:32 AM, holding his prescription for pain meds and hoping the overnight pharmacy was still a thing that was happening in their neighborhood. In the car, he talks about really dumb shit to Jem.

“I have loved you for over half of my life. Isn’t that insane?”

“Kind of, yeah, considering how common divorce is nowadays.”

“Gosh, I’m trying to say that you should marry me, you know, when you have a free minute.”

“Yes, Mako, okay? Yes.”

“Will you marry me when we’re seventy? We’d have nothing to lose.”

“Of course.”

“Will you marry me when all of my teeth are gone? And I can’t talk anymore? Will you love me when my mind goes and you’re the only thing I remember?”

“Of course, Mako.” Jem says, smiling at Mako beneath the soft glow of the red light. “Duh.”

Mako knows he’ll never love Jem as he does right now, in this moment, in the passenger seat of Jem’s lozenge-ass car with their palms quietly communing. He will never again love him while the radio’s off and all they have to listen to is the air conditioner and the road and his musings, always smart. He will never again love him the way he does when he’s taking him home because it’s time to go home, taking him back to that mid-century cave in which they’ll eat frozen lasagna and talk with the kid and probably go to bed way after the hour has passed two o’clock, how uncaring they’ve become in their ripening age and special needs existence. He will never again love Jem so much, never again feel so happy - so perfectly fucking happy.

But hey - what does he know, really? Maybe this feeling will make a repeat appearance someday. They have a hell of a lot of years and car rides home in New Orleans ahead of them.

“You want the radio?” Jem asks at the same red light, eyes twin beacons of adoration shining on Mako’s tired face.

Mako gives his head a doggish shake. “I’m fine with just you.”

They share a momentary smile over the center console. The light turns green - green like Poseidon’s hair.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5SvxwtYJa4h7bAEpEHLTUe?si=MNgN7FZbSoeGSgcSaFH6eQ << a soundtrack.  
> this must be the place is the first track, but you can listen to the whole playlist after that on shuffle.


End file.
